Lessons in Ordinary
by Farther
Summary: [RaeXBB] When Raven loses her powers, Beast Boy steps in to protect her.
1. i

A/N: Just to be clear, I'm making up the details on Raven's past, particularly concerning her relationship with her mother, since the show doesn't really give us any – that's part of the fun of it, I suppose ;) If it's wrong in comic canon, well, that's okay with me. Enjoy, everyone.

I don't own Teen Titans.

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i. Prologue

* * *

Raven didn't sleep often. She didn't like the idea of giving up her mind to the night.

Even as a child, she had lain awake for long hours in the dark, in her single bed, in her lonely, undecorated room, eyes straining for hidden predators where there was nothing but air and un-light. Yes, that had been foolish. The only predator she had ever needed to be afraid of was herself.

Because if dreams were the workings of the subconscious mind, well… Her subconscious was not meant to be free, and she had no desire to see what its workings would look like. No, no, no…

As she grew, she found that meditation could give her a portion of the energy that her body took from sleep. But she was not a machine and she could not do entirely without, wish as she might (and she did wish, fervently and often, until she understood that it was useless and discarded it).

So she learned to tie down her night terrors as firmly as she tied down her heart. She meditated on blanketing her mind each time she surrendered to unconsciousness, and now if she slept, then her dreams slept too, dormant, somewhere deep enough that she could pretend they weren't there at all.

No, Raven didn't sleep often, and now she was tired of being awake, tired on the inside. Her tired was bone-deep and permanent. She had crawled into bed anyway, knowing that feeling would still be there in the morning, wanting to escape further than the meditative trance, further to where nothing would follow, searching for an opiate that did not exist.

She had already barred her mind from dreams tonight, and still she was awake. Frustrated, Raven rolled over in the bed and opened her eyes.

Her room was gray and hazy in the dark, not as empty as her room on Azarath, but still just as lonely.

And… so what? She liked her privacy.

But privacy and isolation were two different things. And it wasn't in her to separate them. Even though Trigon was defeated – had been defeated for more than a year now – it just wasn't in her. She thought of the party afterwards, so full of hope. Everyone was smiling. Even her.

But perversely, what should have been easier had only become more difficult. The inch of freedom that Trigon's death had granted her just seemed to underscore how limited she still was. She knew she had friends who cared about her. And she knew that the root of her limitations, her powers, had given her those friends and made her a Titan.

But didn't they also make her incapable of returning the friendship that they had given her? Didn't her powers cripple her, even as they made her stronger? Didn't they hold her back, hurt her, lower her, make her less, un-whole and incomplete and incapable and inhuman…?

Everyone had a weakness, yes, she knew, and she was her own, so that made her a weakness, a weak little weakness that could tear down the city with a smile and rebuild it with a sigh, that's what she was. That's all, all.

Raven slammed the door shut on that line of thought.

Just one more thing she disliked about sleep. The way the mind must wander on its own before it can become blank and rest. And wasn't that wandering what she was trying to avoid by sleeping in the first place?

That was when the alarm went off. Red lights sliced into the darkness.

Half-grateful and half-irritated, Raven got up to meet with the rest of the Titans and save the city. Again.

* * *

He was a villain they had never seen before. He wore thief's black and an amateur mask made out of a stocking hat, but the high-tech hover board that held him like a feather implied that he was not your average robber. Even so, he did not make a very threatening sight, with his slim, almost awkward build.

A bad guy robbing the city museum in the middle of the night. Well, at least she had been dragged out of bed for something original.

Raven wondered why the police had not taken care of this. She watched the thief's board zip around the pair of bolts that Starfire had sent his way and then remembered that, oh, yes, he was too fast for them.

But he was also, apparently, an idiot.

"Fools!" cried the thief. An enormous red gem glinted in his hand. It was reputably the biggest ruby in existence, and it had been on display in the Jump City Museum. Until tonight. "You don't even know what this is, do you?"

Raven rolled her eyes.

"We know enough!" Robin retorted, always willing to exchange barbs with the enemy. Raven, by comparison, had always been an advocate of silent efficiency. "Now, hand it over!"

But the thief just zipped aside of Robin's projectiles and the simultaneous blast from Cyborg's cannon. Beast Boy was the one who got the closest when he became an octopus and latched onto the board itself with his tentacles.

The thief looked down at him, and by some unseen command the board began to glow red-hot around the edges. Beast Boy was forced to let go or become fried calamari. With a yelp he dropped, smoking, to the ground.

Okay. Enough.

"It's been here, unknown, all this time," said the thief, with a manic edge to his voice. Raven wasn't really listening, just watching the glint of the stolen ruby, reminded briefly and abstractly of the glinting of the sun off the towers on Azarath. Stupidly, the thief held up the thing with one hand. "But now, I'm going to use it –"

When he looked up triumphantly at his prize it was to see that it had gone all black. His eyes, the only visible part of his face, went wide with shock.

Underneath her hood, Raven smirked.

Quickly she sent out a thread of her power to connect with the gem and bring it back to her. She opened herself to it, feeling the edges and planes of the ruby with her mind, reaching for it in order to reel it in.

She didn't expect anything to reach back, because nothing ever had before.

She felt the flash of premonition only in the instant before she was met with an invading tendril of… something that was distinctly _not her_. Something that was other, like Trigon had been other.

"Raven!" somebody called her name, and she couldn't have said who it was to save her life.

So… it wasn't just a ruby after all, she thought, and then lost track of the outside world. Her vision swam, as if she were drowning, sinking down into black.

She did not want it, but it was like in the meditation rooms on Azarath, where the water trickled into the ponds and none of the rocks on the bottom stayed dry, only she was the rocks and the other was seeping inevitably all the way through her to the ends, rooting through her, searching, and she felt drawn out every which way and scattered, reaching out to be whole again but finding nothing to grasp her, until she was like a star grasping uselessly for its brothers in the emptiness of space.

_'You think you're alone, Raven. But you're not.'_

That was the first that bubbled up from the emptiness.

Her mind, her memories, melted down and strung out and regurgitated, and she was caught in the deluge, sinking, sinking, and she sensed, like the faraway bright spot of the sun through the deep water, that the other was there and yet apart from it all.

_She was a child on Azarath, kept away from the others, like a little secret. She snuck away to peek at the other children as they walked, singing, in a line to school and recognized that she was the leader of a solitary life, one which she had not asked for, and could not understand._

_She looked down into the round pond in the meditation room. The water was clear enough that she could see the pebbles on the bottom in dusky browns, reds, and blues. The black and gray ones looked dull and lonely among the rest. She kicked at the surface of the pool until the image was obstructed. _

_Her mother, watching her with sad eyes, holding and caring for her, but always at a distance, even when she was close enough to touch. She touched her mother's hand with a trembling finger. It was cold. _

_'…Mama?' she whispered, but there was no reply._

_In the dark, the glitter of a malevolent gaze._

_She came to the city (why did she come to the city?) and joined the Titans, finally a part of the group and yet not a part. She cared for them from a distance, and they allowed her to. _

_Wasn't that always the way?_

_Malchior, teaching and understanding her, (loving her?), betraying her._

_The Titans…_

_'You think you're alone, but you're not.'_

There was a kind of ripping-away that left her feeling wounded and bereft of something unknown, and it was followed by darkness as she had never known it before, as intensely lonely as if the world had shut itself off around her.

But she recognized that it was over, the other had retreated, and the event was becoming a blur, almost a non-memory in her mind, an empty space where the memory should have been.

On the outside she had only made a choking noise and collapsed to the ground.

"Raven? Are you alright?"

Opening her eyes was like waking from a dream within a long sleep. Robin was kneeling next to her, she noticed first, with Starfire hovering over his shoulder. He was probably the one who had spoken. Beast Boy sat on the other side of her, and Cyborg stood in the background.

"I'm fine," she said, instinctively. She didn't hurt, anyway, but as she struggled to sit up she noticed that her body felt heavier than it ever had before, while on the inside she felt unaccountably… buoyant. "What about the thief?"

"The guy got away," Cyborg was the one to answer. The others shifted uncomfortably. "And he took the ruby with him."

"How?" she asked, surprised and irritated all at once. They had been bested by a skinny guy on a hover board. Things just kept getting better.

"He used a smoke screen," Robin told her, clenching a fist in obvious anger. "He ran the first chance he got."

"And… nobody went after him," she interpreted flatly.

"We did not want to leave you in hazardous condition," said Starfire earnestly, the same way she said all things. "You appeared to be in great pain…"

Raven decided she did not like the way they were all looking at her, a nervous, on-the-fence sort of a look. The way you would look at something rabid.

"I'm fine," she said again, no longer certain whether she was speaking to them or to herself. The nervous look only got worse. "You should have gone after him. I can take care of myself."

Silence. Raven was beginning to get annoyed with this.

"Um, dude…" said Beast Boy, "…_can_ you?"

She narrowed her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"Raven, you… you look different," Robin told her, always the brave one. But he winced as if he was expecting her to bite his arm off as he said it.

"Yes," Starfire agreed. "The change in your appearance is most alarming. Do you not feel altered in some way?"

"No," Raven replied darkly. But that wasn't true, she remembered, thinking of the lightness and heaviness she felt. It seemed to be fading away. That, or she was just getting used to it. "…Different, how?" she asked, morbidly curious.

No one said anything for a moment, and Raven realized why this treatment bothered her so much. Because if they acted as if she were something breakable, she could believe that maybe she was.

"Your hair," said Beast Boy, finally. "And your eyes, and your…"

He gestured to his forehead, the spot where…

"My chakra?" Her hand fluttered up to the space where it should have been, and found nothing. And now that she looked at her hand she saw that the skin there was less pallid and more alive than it should have been.

"It's not just that," added Cyborg. "Your signature on my scanner has changed too."

She raised an eyebrow. "And that means…?"

"That's what we'd like to know," said Robin. "What happened to you, Raven?"

Wasn't it obvious by now that she didn't know either? Sick of being scrutinized, she went to pull her hood up with her powers, and in that moment realized the significance of those earlier conflicting feelings. They had all but faded by now, but she knew with distant clarity that the heaviness had been gravity weighing down on her, the lightness had been the freedom of her emotions from bondage.

"I… lost my powers," she noted tonelessly, as if it were somebody else it had happened to and not her.

* * *

A/N: The rest of the chapters will be longer – this is only the prologue, after all. Reviews would be really nice :) 


	2. ii

ii. Chapter One

* * *

Raven had never been one for primping, but she had stared into the mirror for a long time once she returned from the museum, safely holed up in her room. After the initial shock had worn off, she had been unable to resist the temptation.

With the lights turned up high (without her powers it was too much trouble to light all the candles, and she had no matches anyway) she stood in front of the large mirror on her bureau, sometimes drifting away from it, and always coming back again, drawn in by the obvious differences whenever she saw them at the edge of her vision. Finally, she gave in and just stared, with the lights blazing fluorescent on her white, white skin, studying herself from all angles.

Like Beast Boy had said – hair, eyes, chakra. That was the most apparent.

Only hours ago, her hair had been indigo and so had her eyes. That had been her mother's legacy, her mother whose beauty had been too incredible for it to be repeated in her daughter. Raven could remember consoling herself with her hair and her eyes as a child, back when she used to compare herself to Arella, fiercely wanting to be a woman like she was, elegant and statuesque.

She didn't even have that much anymore and she didn't know exactly what to feel… but that was something she had never known. Even her own emotions were often alien and inexplicable to her.

And now her hair was mouse-brown and so were her eyes. Her chakra had vanished, another severed connection to her mother and her powers. And her skin, while it had always been pale, had lost its gray, otherworldly quality and become… normal was the only way to describe it. Flesh-colored, like a human's skin, like Robin's, like her mother's.

Normal was the only way to describe any of it. When she looked into the mirror, the girl staring back at her could have blended in on any street in Jump City. There was a kind of ordinariness about her.

Her features were the same, anyway, it was just the coloring that had changed, so perhaps that ordinariness had been there all along.

Be rational, she told herself.

But the only thing she could think of was how unnatural her uniform had become. It looked strange to see her new reflection wearing the cloak and leotard.

Without pausing to consider it, she peeled off her suit, stripping down to her underthings before the mirror and seeing that the flesh color had in fact spread over all of her skin.

She looked at her body dispassionately, small and lean and curvier than Starfire's but somehow less desirable. She was short, she realized, without the ability to float making up for it. Not the shortest on the team, that was Beast Boy's position (or was it? suddenly she was not quite sure), but still –

What did it matter? Why was she even thinking of this?

Raven glanced at the pile of her uniform on the floor. She didn't want to climb back into it, but she had no other clothes and she felt stupid for caring about it at all.

She pulled out a fresh suit from her closet and put that on. She tugged at the sleeves. It felt wrong. Like she didn't deserve to wear it, now that she was – there was no other word for it – now that she was useless (And how long would that last…?).

Blotting out the feelings that accompanied that thought was a little more difficult than it used to be, but she had spent all her life practicing. She left her room, needing to get away from herself, purposefully not glancing in the mirror on the way out.

A moment later she had to go back to turn off the lights. Normally, she would have used her powers to do it.

There was nobody in the halls as she made her way instinctively to the living room. She half-hoped nobody would be in there either, even though she knew that was unlikely. She didn't want to see them – after all, what could she say to them, or they to her? But she didn't want to be alone either.

She paused outside the door to the living room, her mind wandering back to the atmosphere inside the T-car on the ride home – tense, awkward, palpably silent. No, she didn't want any more of that.

But Raven was used to not getting what she wanted.

She tapped the control pad, and the doors slid open.

Surprisingly, though, the room was empty and silent, except for what sounded like soft snoring coming from the area around the couch. She tried to float noiselessly over toward the sofa to investigate before she remembered that she couldn't do that anymore. As it was, her body gave a funny sort of lurch, with her feet sticking flat to the ground and the rest of her trying to move forward.

For the first time since she could remember, Raven fell flat on her face.

"Uh, Raven…?"

As she peeled herself up off the floor, she could see Beast Boy staring groggily at her from over the back of the sofa where he had apparently been drowsing. Ugh. At least he hadn't actually seen her fall. She would never be able to live that down.

"Where are the others?" she asked, without preamble, pretending not to be embarrassed.

Beast Boy blinked at her a few times, then rapidly shook his head to clear it. He stretched, yawning, showing off the pearly fangs among his regular teeth.

"They went off to search for our thief as soon as morning hit. We would have told you, but Robin said – well, we thought you'd want to be alone…" he trailed off. When she looked out the window, she saw with a start that it was already light out. She hadn't noticed in her room with the blinds closed. "Robin says if we find that jewel thingy we can find out what happened to your powers and how to get them back."

"My powers…" she repeated, faintly.

That was assuming she wanted them back in the first place. The thought bubbled up out of nowhere.

Of course she wanted them back. What was she without her powers?

…What was she…?

Raven shook her head. It was pointless to think about it.

"What about you?" she asked, focusing back in on Beast Boy.

"Well…" Two spots of pink appeared on his cheeks. That usually wasn't a good sign. "Somebody had to stay behind and, you know… protect you," he finished in a small voice.

"Oh." She couldn't think of anything better to say.

_Protecting her._

She had been four when she realized that her guards were there for the sake of the city and not for her. She remembered her mother holding her so tight that it hurt, not so much stroking her hair as pressing it flat with hard, cool hands. There was a loud noise when the balcony collapsed, and even though she couldn't see around the white-cloaked shoulder where her face was pressed, she knew that she had killed the baby bird that she had tried so hard to reach, wanting to stroke the tiny down-covered body. Its slim little bones had been so clearly visible beneath the day-old skin...

Okay. Enough with the golden childhood memories. Those weren't going to help her now.

"That… still doesn't explain why _you're_ here," she said finally.

Beast Boy stopped looking uncomfortably at his lap to stare at her pseudo-indignantly over the back of the sofa where he was still sitting. "Hey! I can take care of the baddies just as well as anybody else!" He paused. "If… any decide they want to show up, that is."

"What did you guys do?" she asked, trying not to care. "Draw straws?"

"No!" he began hotly, and then faltered. "I – I said I would do it…"

"Oh," she said again, taken aback in spite of herself. After a moment, she forced herself to respond more fully. "… Thank you."

He grinned at her, flashing teeth. It was strange, but Raven found that she didn't mind that he was the one who had stayed behind. Starfire would have smothered her with understanding, Robin would have questioned her about the gem, Cyborg wouldn't have known what to do with her, and neither would Beast Boy, exactly, but he would know enough to pretend that nothing had changed, that she could be sure of.

If she could pretend that nothing had changed, she wouldn't have to wonder what she would do if her powers never returned, or what she would do if they did. She wouldn't have to wonder at all.

"So…" said Beast Boy. "Do you want to, um – research that gem thingy? 'Cause if you do, that's cool, I won't complain or anything…"

Slowly, Raven shook her head. She knew it was the right thing to do, the best thing to do, and she did want – _need_ – her powers back, but she found herself saying…"It can wait until the others get back."

She didn't want to have to think about it. Any of it.

Beast Boy looked surprised, but he bounced back quickly, like he always did. "O-okay, well, there's lots of other stuff we can do."

"…Like what?" she asked stiffly, prepared to regret it.

"Uh… GameStation?"

She rolled her eyes. "I don't do video games."

This was the point where, under normal circumstances, she would have gone back to her room and found something to do by herself, but these were not normal circumstances, and right now she just… didn't want to be alone. She couldn't be alone.

Against her will, she shivered.

"Wait!" said Beast Boy. For the first time, she was grateful he had cut into her thoughts. "I've got it! We could watch TV, or a movie or something – you'd do that, right? Or we could play ping-pong, or foosball, or dodgeball, or any kind of ball – or we could dance, or – _or_ we could read depressing poetry, I know you like that, or we could just… you know, talk… um –"

"Stop," Raven cut in. "You're being ridiculous."

He thumped his chest. "It's what I do best."

"I know," she said flatly.

He just smiled benignly and shifted to look at her more fully, resting his forearms on the back of the sofa. She wished he would get mad at her sometimes. Maybe she should have been grateful that he didn't, but she hated to feel indebted to anybody.

"Raven… I think you should choose" he said after a moment. His eyes were all earnestness and promise. "I'll do anything you want to do. I mean it."

Why did he have to have those offbeat moments of sensitivity? He probably wasn't even aware of it, and it was too unsettling, and she didn't want to think about why. She told herself not to be affected by it.

"I… don't know what I want…" she admitted, once she had found her voice.

"Should I keep suggesting things?"

"No."

Raven crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at her uniform. It was beginning to itch, which was strange because it never had before. Probably a psychological effect of her discomfort with it, she reasoned, but that didn't make the itching go away. Briefly, she thought of asking Beast Boy if he had any clothes she could wear…

No. _No._ Bad idea.

And as uncomfortable as she felt in her suit, there was also an odd reluctance within her to part with it, as if keeping it with her would keep everything safe and the same.

"Okay. Why don't we watch a movie?" she said finally. That would pass the time, at least, until the others returned, with or without the gem. And then… well, then she would see. She felt as if she were in a sort of limbo – she, and Beast Boy, here in the tower, just waiting.

Because you didn't get a lot of waiting in Titan's Tower, unless you counted the waiting for Robin and Starfire to hook up already, and that was a whole other story, one Raven didn't really want to have any part in… Firmly, she stopped her mind from wandering.

"Great, now we're getting somewhere," said Beast Boy, grinning. The amazing thing was that he actually meant it. On her a phrase like that would have come out sarcastic, no matter how she tried to say it.

Beast Boy hopped off the couch and wandered over to the shelf where they kept the movies, next to the TV. "So… what do you want to watch? Action? Comedy? _Romance_…?" At that he looked over his shoulder at her and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.

Raven rolled her eyes and came up next to him to look at the selection. She wasn't exactly an avid filmgoer. Most of the titles were unfamiliar to her, and she certainly hadn't bought any of them herself. But there had to be one there that would keep her from losing her mind for a few hours.

"How about this one?" Beast Boy suggested, holding up 'Donnie Darko.' "It's dark and creepy. I bet you'd like it."

That stung. Why had that stung?

"Not everything I like is dark and creepy," she told him, frowning. Try as she might, she couldn't keep herself from glancing sideways at him when she felt him watching her.

"I don't think that," he said.

There was a silent moment, during which she refused to look at him, pretending to examine her shoes. She felt a rush of relief when he finally turned his attention back to the movies. She should never have said anything in the first place.

"So… are you trying to tell me you'd rather watch 'Shrek 2' instead?" He held up the box. She stared at the cartoon characters on the front of it and came to a conclusion.

"This is Starfire's doing."

"Uh, yeah," said Beast Boy, putting it back on the shelf. "But it's actually pretty funny for a kids' movie. And I don't think there's anything wrong with watching a movie about a green dude –"

"Of course not," she murmured.

"Hey, you know why us green guys have to stick together?" he asked.

Raven sighed. She dearly hoped he wasn't going to say what she thought he was going to say.

Unfortunately…

"'Cause it's not easy being green!"

She groaned.

"Yeah, you're right, that was pretty bad," he conceded. He turned to examine her. "You know, you sure say a lot without actually saying anything."

She stared at him. "What?"

She knew it had been a mistake to ask, because immediately afterward he launched into unnecessary explanation.

"I mean, you do a lot of sighing and eye-rolling and glaring, and then when you do talk, it's like you try to use the smallest amount of words that you can –"

"So?" she glared.

"See, that's exactly what I'm talking about!"

Irritated, she folded her arms and looked away from him.

"If you followed any person in the city, all day, on any day of the year, nearly all the conversations you heard would be completely pointless," she said blackly. "Just like this one."

"Dude, this conversation is _not_ pointless," he protested.

"Why not?" she challenged.

"Because people need to talk about pointless things! That's how they get to know each other." A moment later, he ruined the effect by confusedly adding, "I think…"

"Whatever," she said.

But… she hated it when he surprised her by being partway right.

"Aw, come on, just admit that it's not pointless. You know you wanna –"

It was almost fortunate that they were interrupted when they were, because it only could have escalated into bickering from there. They never did pick out a movie, though.

A crash of shattering glass cut Beast Boy off. The sound was as big and as shocking as an earthquake. Both he and Raven whipped their heads in the direction of the window that had been broken in and was now a gaping hole leading out to the bay. A figure floated in the empty frame.

Raven's eyes widened. It was the thief. He wasn't wearing his mask, but he appeared not to have changed clothes since the night before and the floating board was a dead giveaway. Uncovered, his face was lean and young and utterly normal beneath a mop of bedraggled dark hair.

Raven had the sneaking suspicion that Robin and the others would not have the jewel with them when they came back.

"What did you do to it!" he asked. Even in his anger, he just didn't look all that threatening. "It's not working. What did you do?"

"Uh… what are you talking about?" asked Beast Boy, scratching his head, apparently about as scared by the return of the thief as she was. Raven glared at him. He was the one with the powers here. He was _supposed_ to be doing something.

"The jewel!" The thief answered, and stabbed a finger at Raven. "I saw you do something! What did you do?"

Raven slowly moved past Beast Boy and closer to the intruder, knowing she had to take action, but not what she would do. Something that she thought might be adrenaline was welling up inside her. Her heart was pounding in her ears.

"I didn't do anything that I know of," she said, voice calm and measured. Inside she was fluttering. "If anything, that jewel did something to me."

"Raven…" said Beast Boy. But she couldn't let him stop her.

"Something to you…?" echoed the thief, looking pole-axed. The words seemed to strike him."Oh… that might be…"

The board began to move backwards, away from the window, picking up speed. But – she shouted.

"_No!_"

A surge of desperation rushed her – she could see her powers slipping away, slipping away from her for always, and with or without them she was alone, but at least they were _hers_ and as long as she had them she had a place in the tower and she needed that place more urgentlythan she had ever needed anything.

Before she knew what she was doing, Raven was running for the empty window, launching herself flightless out into the air, with her cloak riding out on the wind behind her.

She heard Beast Boy calling her name, but soon his voice was far away because she had found the edges of the thief's board with her fingers and was holding on, hanging on, as he flew from the tower at full speed. If she looked down she knew she would see her feet dangling high over the bay, so she looked determinedly up, trying hard to swing a leg over the side of the board.

"What are you doing?" asked the thief. His brown eyes were wide and worried. Strange, but Raven didn't have the energy to care.

"I _need_ that jewel," she grunted. Finally she got one foot up and used the leverage to get her knee to follow. By the colors rushing under her she could tell they were no longer over the water but over the city.

"Let go," said the thief, squatting by her but not touching her. "I don't want to have to –"

"No!" She had brought one arm up now. The thief stood, and abruptly she realized what was coming, just a moment before she felt the tingle of heat that quickly turned to burning wherever her body touched the edge of the board.

She gasped and looked up at the thief, eyes wide and unseeing. It was no time at all before she let go.

With the wind buffeting her, tangling her cloak about her, Raven fell.

* * *

A/N: Alright, if the thief seems a little lame, well, that's because he is. You'll see. Eventually.

Anyway, thanks for all the wonderful reviews! I'm glad people are enjoying this story.

Now, please review? It would make me really happy :)


	3. iii

iii. Chapter Two

* * *

It was like taking a leap and missing the ledge you had aimed for. Raven reached for her powers as soon as she let go of the thief's board, and found nothing. It was like a crutch breaking out from under her. She dropped out of the sky, her mind going bizarrely blank, her heart leaping into her throat, time stretching as if to catch her.

She didn't know what to do. She didn't what do to know. She what know didn't –

With a shattering thud, Raven slammed into the roof of a building and lied there, stunned. The wind had been knocked out of her. She couldn't breathe. She had never felt so weak or so foolish in her life, not even when Malchior –

No. She still had enough of her sense left not to go there.

She began to rise, trying to prop herself up with one palm on the roof. Bad idea. Oh, _oh_, bad idea, worst idea she'd ever had. She hissed in pain.

When she went to look at her right hand, she found that there was an angry red line burned into her skin, just short of being a gash, on the place where she had been holding on to the hover board. There were more straight-line burns, one on the inside of her right thigh, another on the inside of her left arm above the elbow, and another right across the rib cage, an inch below her breasts. The last two were less serious, but they had made holes in her uniform.

Raven curled down over her knees. It hurt, was where her mind was stuck, it hurt, it _hurt_. Tears stung her eyes. Why had she jumped after the thief?

Why had she jumped?

There was a sudden swooping of wings behind her, and when she looked up, Beast Boy was there. He took a concerned step toward her, then stopped, uncertain. His hands, which had been reaching out as if to touch her, withdrew and hung at his sides.

Well, she didn't want to be touched anyway, she told herself, blinking rapidly to clear her eyes. She never wanted to be touched. And now she only wanted to curl up alone and die.

"Raven, are you okay? Are you hurt?" he asked. The urgency in his voice was startling.

For a moment, she didn't know what to say. Then she pointed in the direction the thief had gone. "W-what are you doing? Follow him!"

Beast Boy stared down at her. "Raven, he's already gone."

She leaned her head heavily on her uninjured hand and closed her eyes. Yes, she had known that. Stupid to say that, stupid to have jumped, stupid to feel the red-raw skin as if it were still being scorched – No, she wouldn't think about that. She wouldn't think about anything.

"I – I'm sorry." Beast Boy's voice cut into the silence. "I wasn't much of a protector."

Raven took a deep breath to steady herself. "No. You didn't do anything wrong. I was the one who – what I did was –" She broke off and stared at the ground, biting her tongue on a wounded noise. It hurt. She had been so stupid, and now she was paying for it.

"Here," he offered after a moment. "Let me help you up."

"No," she shook her head again, not looking at him. _So_ stupid. "I'll be fine."

"Please," he said, stepping closer. As he reached out to touch her, he saw the burns for the first time. "Rae! You – you're…"

Of course the first thing he said was her name. He said her name a lot, she noticed, absently.

"I'll be _fine_," she repeated irrationally through gritted teeth, humiliated and angry and hurting most of all. Why, why was she arguing? What was the point? But she didn't care anymore about the point, just wanted to curl up alone and die.

"What's you're problem? I'm just trying to help you!"

"I don't need help!"

"Yes, you do!"

That was when they realized they were no longer alone.

"Um… hello, what's going on up here?"

Raven could barely raise her head to look for the source of the voice. A civilian woman stood in the doorway that led down the stairs and into the building. She had a short bob of brown hair, and the sun glinted off of her wire-rimmed glasses.

"Are you…" she stared at them. "…the Titans…?"

Beast Boy scratched the back of his head. "Uh… yeah…"

"Beast Boy, right?" The woman came slowly closer. Raven closed her eyes, nerves firing off all over, powerfully, like canons, searing her seared flesh. "And… are you Raven? You look different in the paper…"

The woman saw Raven's injuries and gave a gasp of horror.

"Oh, God! Are you – no, of course you're not alright, stupid question. Okay. Okay. Can you stand – or… fly? Or something?"

"I can walk," Raven answered, not sure why it mattered, not caring. She assumed she could walk anyway. Haltingly, with Beast Boy reaching out twice to steady her only to withdraw, she climbed to her feet to test it out.

Instantly, she wished she hadn't, but she remained standing anyway, retreating into her cloak, cradling both arms against her. Her vision swam, and she wanted only to fall back to the floor and sleep, fall back and curl up and anything, anything at all, just to make it go away…

"Why don't you come inside with me? I live in this building –"

But she didn't want to be here anymore. She wanted to go back to her room where she could be alone and forget all of it had happened, forget that she had been so stupid and allow her wounds to heal.

"No," Raven cut the woman off. Somehow, she kept her voice steady. "Thank you, but we have an infirmary at the tower. And we should be heading there now." She shot a pointed glance at Beast Boy. He looked surprised.

"But Raven, I can't carry you! Do you really want to be dangling by your arms way up in the air right now?" He waved his arms as if to underscore his point.

"I do if it means getting back home already," she said blackly. But inwardly she realized with a wince what a bad idea it was.

"No way!" replied Beast Boy, folding his arms across his chest emphatically. "That'll just get you more hurt, and I'm not doing that."

"He's right," the civilian woman put in. As if it were any of her business. Raven resented her right then. "That wouldn't be a good idea."

Beast Boy stood up taller. "See?" he said triumphantly.

Raven let out a breath. She just wanted to get out of here. She hurt all over. She hurt _so much_. She couldn't remember ever hurting worse than this. And she needed to…

No, she realized with a start, she didn't _need_ to meditate. That was a bizarre concept.

"Why don't you call the others, then?" Raven asked, and it would have come off as desperate if she had been anybody else. "Where's your communicator?"

"Uh…" said Beast Boy, frantically patting his pockets. Oh, she didn't like the sound of that. "Oh, yeah, I remember… I took it off."

"_What?_" Raven glared at him.

"Well, I was trying to get comfy on the sofa when I was taking my nap, and it kept digging into my side, so I took it off and put it on the floor…. Come on, don't look at me like that! Why don't you just use _your_ communicator?"

Now that she thought about it, her communicator was not hooked to her belt, as it normally was. She remembered dropping her used uniform on the floor earlier in her room, not stopping to unhook the com-link and reattach it to the fresh suit.

"I… don't have it," she admitted. Her burns flared sharply, as if they were still pressed so closely to the steel, skin crumbling and burning away. She shook.

"Ha!" said Beast Boy, smiling widely. "Who's little miss perfect now?" He paused. "Wait…"

Raven rolled her eyes. "You are, Beast Boy."

That drew his attention to her. "Raven, you're shaking…"

Beside them, the woman cleared her throat. Raven had almost forgotten she was there.

"Do you need help? I want to help you, if I can," she said, not hesitant at all but straightforward.

"Yeah," Beast Boy replied, before Raven could get a word in. "That'd be great. Wouldn't it, Raven?"

She stared at him grimly, but she didn't care enough to argue anymore. It hurt too much to argue anymore. She allowed herself to be led to the apartment where the woman – who introduced herself as Joy Anderson – lived. It was cluttered up with knick-knacks, rough clay pottery and figurines, dolls, decorative boxes, ferns in hand-painted pots.

Before she knew it, Raven had been shown to the bathtub, handed a set of clean clothes, and left alone to peel off her ripped uniform and get some cold water on those burns, which was supposed to help them. So she did all that, swaying on her feet, trying to let her mind wander away, only it was anchored by the pain, which receded and swelled back up like an ocean's edge over and over, as if the nerves too were swaying as they burned her.

Finally she dressed herself in the soap-smelling clothes: an over-sized t-shirt, brown and well-worn, and a pair of faded flannel draw string shorts that bared her leg until an inch above the knee. They felt good and clean. But even so, all she wanted was to fall over and die.

She had been a fool to jump, and now she had the injuries to show for it and nothing else. And Beast boy knew she had done it, and so the other Titans would know, too, in time. They would try to pity her, wouldn't they? As if she weren't humiliated enough already, with no powers, only a weak human body, which she had gone and injured right off the bat, failing miserably in her attempt at heroism. A stupid, stupid attempt. An embarrassment.

Why had she jumped? Why had it seemed like the only course of action at the time? She remembered seeing the last link to her powers slipping off, and the desperation stealing over her, choking her. And she jumped. She could have been killed. Was that how much her powers were worth to her?

She didn't want to think about it. So she shut that part of her mind off.

Raven paused at the bathroom door. When she tipped it open, she could hear the not-so-far-away voices of Beast Boy, and the woman, Joy. She stood for a minute, leaning heavily against the door frame, listening.

"…when I heard a bang from the roof," the woman's voice floated to her. "I live on the top floor, you see, with my husband – he's away on business right now – and so I went up to see what it was…"

"It was Raven," said Beast Boy.

"Do you mind if I ask what happened?"

"She… uh… she fell…"

"But… isn't she one of the ones who fly?"

A pause. Raven found herself leaning in a little, to hear.

"…No."

Raven shook herself and walked out into the kitchen then, where the two were seated at an island counter. As she came into the room, she heard Beast Boy steer the conversation into safer waters.

"Did you paint all this?" he asked, gesturing to the ceiling, which was painted with clouds on top of a cheerful robin's egg blue.

"Oh, no, no, no," said Joy, smiling warmly. "I'm no an artist. I had a friend do it for me. Lovely work, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Beast Boy replied. "Cool."

Raven made a little noise in her throat, feeling a swell of terrible pain. She told herself that it wasn't a whimper and clung to her cloak and uniform, folded in her arms.

On cue, Joy and Beast Boy turned to her. Beast Boy's eyes widened a little bit, she noticed, probably at the sight of her in a pair of dumpy shorts. Normally, she would have refused the clothing point blank. But obviously… she wasn't normal anymore. Or, rather, she was, and that was the difference.

"Here," said Joy, handing her two bags of frozen peas. "Take these. I'm sorry, I didn't have any ice packs…"

But Raven set her cloak down on the counter and took the bags without hesitating, just for the brief, subsiding relief when she placed them on her burns. She hardly cared that they were bags of vegetables, or that she was wearing somebody else's clothing, if she could just get it to stop hurting. God, she had been so stupid… She closed her eyes.

For some reason, her thoughts drifted back in time to her mother. If Arella were there, she would have sat her down without fuss and helped her into a healing trance (another thing that was barred to her now). That's what she would have done. Because Arella had seemed to love her daughter fiercely at times and distantly at others, and she was always sad and beautiful and far away, like a star, and Raven had worshiped her and wanted to be just like her. And now…

"I called a cab for you two," Joy said. "It should be here shortly."

"We were gonna call an ambulance," Beast Boy told her, "but –"

"I don't want an ambulance," she interrupted. She thought of the lights, and the siren, and the commotion, and the people. No, she didn't want that, no matter what… even if it hurt so much that she couldn't take it, which it almost did. She told herself that she ought to be strong and not feel it.

Beast Boy looked at her. "I knew you wouldn't," he said simply.

"Oh." Raven frowned and concentrated instead on pressing the frozen peas to the wound on her upper arm. It didn't help very much, but it was better than nothing.

"Do you want any more ice?" asked Joy.

"No," said Raven. She didn't know how she would hold ice to all four injuries at once. "But thank you."

And then silence. It was a small eternity before the cab came, but finally the buzzer by the door rang, and Joy showed them down to the door and pressed some money in their hands to pay the driver, and they said they would pay her back when they came to return the clothes, and Joy said not to worry about it, it was the least she could do, and so on and so forth, until she was gone and Beast Boy and Raven were sitting in the back seat of the Jump City cab. The interior was brown vinyl, and it smelled dusty, like old suitcases.

The driver did a sort of double-take when he saw them, but didn't otherwise comment. When they were settled in, he turned to look at them over the divider.

"You going to the hospital?" he asked, eyeing the spots where Raven had covered her injuries with the frozen bags of peas.

"Yeah," said Beast Boy, at the same time as Raven answered, "No."

They looked at each other.

"I want to go home," Raven said flatly, in a tone that should have brooked no argument. But Beast Boy argued anyway. Maybe she was losing her touch.

"Raven, you need to see a doctor –"

"There's burn salve at the Tower. I don't need to go to the hospital. It's not that bad," she lied. It was, it really was, but he knew she was a private person, so couldn't he see that she just wanted to hole up and lick her wounds on her own?

"Look, I know how bad it is!" said Beast Boy suddenly. "I know you're tough and you can take it, but I also know how much it hurts, even if you won't admit it!"

And he snatched off his gloves one at a time. Raven saw that his palms were all bandaged up with beige medical tape. His skin stood out against the skin-colored wrapping. His fingers were blunt and heavy, not yet grown into. She wouldn't have expected him to have such strong-looking hands.

"Cyborg treated me last night, but I had to go to the hospital later anyway," Beast Boy continued more calmly, more quietly. "The stuff we have at the Tower doesn't work that well – I mean, we don't usually handle any fires, so it's just this over-the-counter stuff…"

The words sort of bounced off of her. She stared at his hands.

"Oh," said Raven.

Oh, so… she… wasn't the only one… who had been injured…

Beast Boy, noticing the direction of her gaze, self-consciously began to put his gloves back on. His cheeks were flushed with color.

It was then that she noticed that the cab driver was staring at them. He quickly averted his eyes when she stared back.

"So…" said the driver, clearly pretending that nothing had happened as he turned to face the road, "…You going to the hospital?"

Beast Boy looked to Raven. For a moment, she was silent, as her mind reached back to earlier that morning, on the roof of the apartment building, her fight with Beast Boy, who looked at her with urgent eyes and tried to help her even as she batted him away. She fiddled with the edge of her borrowed flannel shorts.

And then Raven did something that she didn't do often. She surrendered.

"Fine," she said. "The hospital."

The cab purred into motion, sliding smoothly into the Jump City traffic.

Beast Boy smiled. "Good."

"You two mind if I turn on the radio?" asked the driver a moment later from up front.

Raven left it up to Beast Boy to answer, looking out the window with disinterest.

"Sure," he said. She had known he would say that. "Whatever you want."

The driver pressed a button and the radio came to life in a burst of static. He flipped around through a few stations, and finally settled on something that smoothly saturated the cab, seeming to fill it all up with a deep voice that sang:

_'I…I'm so in love with you,_

_Whatever you want to do,_

_Is all right with me…'_

Raven closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window pane, pressing one of the bags of peas to her arm, searching for relief, not finding any. She glanced at Beast Boy without really meaning to, and found him looking at her. Their eyes bounced off of each other and away, back to the window. She felt a knot form in her stomach. She hadn't meant to look at him.

_'Cause you make me feel so brand new,_

_And I want to spend my life with you…'_

She decided it was going to be a long, long trip.

* * *

A/N: I like Raven when she's being difficult :)

The song at the end there, by the way, is 'Let's Stay Together' as performed by Al Green. It's on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. I don't own it. And it will probably be the only song in this fic, so if you really couldn't stand it, you're in the clear.

Big thanks to everybody who reviewed last time! I do love to get reviews... hint, hint.

Next Chapter: Beast Boy and Raven go shopping in the city... what?


	4. iv

iv. Chapter Three

* * *

Raven walked out of the doctor's office, feeling weak and washed out and infinitely better, dosed with numbing painkillers and wet bandages that seemed to all be kicking in at once. She made her way back into the waiting room and stopped in front of Beast Boy, who was sitting slumped down in one of the green vinyl chairs. She was still wearing the plaid shorts and t-shirt that the woman, Joy, had given her.

For a long moment, she stared at his shoes, sloppily tied and coming undone. Then she moved on upwards to where one knee was bouncing restlessly, and up to his lap where he was holding a large egg-shaped toy owl, and then to his eyes, watching her expectantly. He had gentle eyes. She had always noticed that about him, ever since the first day.

"Is that for me?" Raven asked, looking back down at the stuffed owl, pretending that she didn't care, like she always did. Why did she _always_ do that?

"Uh… it can be if you want," he said.

They both knew that meant yes, and he offered the thing up to her. She took it carefully into her arms and simply held it. She thought of the night that they had all gone to the carnival, and the giant chicken doll that now lived in the corner of her closet. Sometimes she opened the door just to look at it, sitting there, because it was so useless and stupid, except as a marker that somebody had cared enough to win it for her. She thought this one would go there too.

"Promise to take good care of it," he said, half-jokingly.

"I promise," she echoed, without much thought. It was soft and downy in her arms and she made herself resist the temptation to bury her face in it. It was bad enough that she was standing there holding the thing in somebody else's well-worn clothing.

"I went and got some money from the bank across the street while you were in there," he told her. "In case you were wondering… Man, it takes waaay too long to make a withdrawal and I can never remember my ATM code. I hate going to the bank."

"Oh," she said.

_But I did it for you_, just sat there, unspoken and unmoving. She ignored it.

Each of the Titans had their own account, where the city poured whatever money wasn't taken up by the cost of the Tower and city repairs, for the Titans to buy their personal stuff. Like a paycheck or a pseudo-allowance for the five parentless children. Raven had hardly used hers, except sometimes to buy books.

Beast Boy got up and stretched, throwing his arms out wide. He scratched his head and looked at her.

"So, uh, feeling any better?" he asked.

She nodded. Her mind was floating around somewhere outside her head, and she didn't quite trust herself to speak. But she did feel better.

"Good," he smiled. "I guess that means we can go back to the Tower, if that's what you want…"

"Actually…" She clamped her mouth shut, frowning. She knew she couldn't trust herself to speak. "No. Never mind."

"What?" he asked, curiously. "What is it?"

Now that she had sparked his interest it would be too difficult to back track. But she was all about futility. She was all about grasping at hope where there was none. Hadn't Robin called her the most hopeful of them all? Certainly, it was true that she kept hoping if she cut off all of her feelings, severed them and let them fall away, that they would not come back.

But melodrama was pointless.

"It's nothing," she said to Beast Boy.

"Aw, you can't just leave me hanging like that!"

"Watch me."

She began to walk out of the waiting room, holding on to the stuffed owl with both arms, the loose t-shirt and shorts swishing, wisping gently against her skin. She wasn't used to that, so different from her skin-tight suit. Beast Boy caught up to her, carrying her cloak and her ripped uniform.

"Please?" he said.

She glanced sideways at him, her boots padding softly on the linoleum. "Why? It's not important."

"If it's not important, then it doesn't matter if you tell me," he challenged.

Raven pressed her lips together. For a moment she didn't reply.

"I need… clothes," she admitted finally, feeling stupid. "Something that lets me get to… my injuries more easily."

"What about your, you know, normal clothes?" he asked quizzically. "Like jeans and t-shirts and stuff…"

She stared down at her boots, moving one after another as she walked.

"I… don't have any…"

She had never realized how strange that was.

Beast Boy seemed to think it was strange, too, because he stopped and stared wide-eyed at her. "Not _any_! But what about all those trips to the mall you take with Starfire?"

Raven shrugged self-consciously. "I never bought anything. And we don't go _that_ often… I don't know." She looked away from him. "It doesn't matter."

Briefly he digested this in silence. They stood there together in the hospital hallway.

"Okay," he said after a moment.

"Okay, what?" she asked, eyeing him with suspicion.

"Okay, let's go," he said.

It was her turn to stare at him.

"I can't go out like this," she sputtered, gesturing to her clothes, and then regretting it when he looked her up and down. She tightened her arms around the owl doll, blushing hotly. Beast Boy didn't seem to notice.

"Wait right here," he told her, grinning with the brightness of an idea, and dashed off before she could open her mouth.

Raven peered after him, not knowing what else to do, half-formed protests sticking to her tongue, until he skidded around a corner and was blocked from view.

She glanced around the hallway, which was sparsely populated, mostly by the elderly. People walked by, sometimes glancing her way, sometimes passing her over completely. Heaving out a sigh, she leaned back against the wall, tucking the stuffed doll under one arm and folding the other behind her back. She scuffed one boot on the floor, back and forth, anxiously.

…What was Beast Boy doing?

All she could do was wait and see. But she had been playing that game her whole life, waiting for Trigon, for her mother, for things that would never come. Waiting and uncertain. She hated that not-knowing that went so often with waiting.

When she was five she had moved away from the home of her mother to train with the monks of Azarath, and live with them in the lonely cloisters. And every day was filled with that desperate not-knowing. When was mother coming? Was she coming at all? Would she ever come again?

Stop thinking about that, she told herself. Absently, she brought her arm out from behind her back and felt the bandages over her ribs through the faded cotton t-shirt with her bandaged hand. The hurt was so much less that it almost wasn't there at all, and she felt fragile and outside herself, as translucent as a jellyfish. She would have to come back here in another week for a check-up, but for now she could believe everything was all right.

Still waiting, Raven lowered her eyes to her boots to avoid making eye contact with the strangers in the hospital hallway. If she couldn't see them, they couldn't see her. She remembered repeating that to herself when she was young, almost believing that if she did it often enough, it would come true. For a moment, then, she felt like a little girl again, unwise and impulsive. She closed her eyes.

"Raven?"

When she looked up at the sound of her name, Raven almost dropped the owl doll in surprise.

"Well," said Beast Boy, "What do you think? Pretty spiffy, right?"

He held one arm out to better display the hospital scrubs he was wearing. They were white and printed with miniscule flowers, and they looked like a pair of particularly ugly pajamas. The delicate bones of ankles and wrists stuck out at each of the cuffs where they weren't quite covered by his gloves or his sneakers. Over his other arm he had draped both their uniforms, and he paused to toss them over one shoulder, striking a pose like a catalogue model.

"I think," replied Raven, after a moment of quietly studying him, "that you are an idiot."

At that he seemed to deflate a little bit, and Raven hated herself for feeling a twinge of guilt.

"How is this supposed to be helping, again?" she asked him.

"I dunno." he scratched the back of his head awkwardly. "I thought you would feel better if we were both wearing something… uh… weird…"

She raised an eyebrow, refusing to be touched. "Weren't you already wearing something weird?"

"Hey, what's wrong with my uniform?"

"Nothing."

"Okay, then. Good." Beast Boy nodded to himself, apparently satisfied. "Let's go!"

Raven hesitated.

"… People will stare."

And she knew she wasn't supposed to care about that. But there were certain things she did not do, and making any kind of spectacle of herself was one of them.

"Dude, Raven, they'd be staring no matter what. Who cares?"

No sound came out when she opened her mouth.

"Come on," Beast Boy repeated, full of energy, and it looked for a moment as if he would grab her hand to lead her away. When he seemed to think better of it, Raven told herself it didn't matter. "Let's go."

"Wait," she said.

He made a noise of impatience. "Raven! You don't look bad –" He seemed to realize what he was saying, and fumbled "– Uh, I mean, you look good. Well, you always look good, and you still do, so, um, there should be no problem. Right?"

Raven didn't know how to respond to that. Nor did she even want to think about it. So she just… didn't. Instead she pulled the prescription that the doctor had given her out of her pocket and held it up.

"I was just going to say that I had to stop at the pharmacy before we leave."

"Oh," said Beast Boy, reddening. "Yeah. I knew that."

So they went to the bank first, where Raven withdrew from her account, and then to the pharmacy so she could buy the salve that had been prescribed to her, and then out of the hospital and into the sprawl of Jump City. It was bright out and the fall air was crisp. After a moment of bickering they decided to find a bus that would take them downtown to the shopping district (and not the mall, Raven had insisted).

Raven had never ridden a public bus before. But, she reflected somewhat bitterly, why would she have? She had never needed to.

Beast Boy seemed to know what he was doing though, so she followed his lead in dropping her fare into the cash box at the front as they boarded. The driver was an unhappy-looking man with a hat pulled down to his eyebrows. He looked at them without curiosity as they moved down the aisle, one after the other. Raven didn't realize how closely she was following Beast Boy until she bumped into the back of him and had to murmur a hasty apology. He flashed her a grin.

She wasn't afraid. But she was uncomfortable, not just with the bus, but with the newness of the situation, the stares they were attracting from the other passengers. She should have been used to being scrutinized. She was, after all, a semi-celebrity, wasn't she? Only, the truth was, she just didn't put herself in a position to be stared at all that often.

She didn't like the way the eyes darted, widened, tried to look away only to be drawn back. She didn't like the discreet, sneaking glances of those too polite to stare and too curious not to. She had had her fill of that on Azarath, where the whispers said demon's child, wild, and dangerous, and pitiful…

"Uh… Raven? Hellooo…?"

She blinked, startled, and drew back from the hand the Beast Boy was waving back and forth before her eyes.

"What?" she asked roughly, caught on the raw.

He shrank away from her a little bit.

"Do… uh… do you mind if I take the window seat?" he said in a rush.

"Does it look like I mind?"

She was swamped immediately with guilt and self-hate.

"I guess not." He gave an awkward attempt at the laugh that normally came so easily to him. "I'll just take it then," he said, to fill the void.

As the bus grumbled into motion, he slid into the seat, holding their uniforms balled up on his lap. Raven sat down next to him, and stared over the head of the owl doll at her white, unspotted knees, wondering why she always ruined everything.

It was a few moments of being jostled about on the un- cushioned seat before she chanced a look around the bus. Beside her, Beast Boy was staring out the window in a way she would have labeled pensive had she not known him personally. From her spot near the back end she could see the passengers up front: a heavy-set woman with a bun piled atop her head, an elderly oriental-looking couple dressed in clean, subdued clothing, a man in a sleeveless shirt and baseball cap, and another in slacks and leather shoes, a mother and child, a pair of teenagers whispering together.

Who were they? What went on behind the occasional shifting glances, and the bored, unrevealing stares? Were they looking at her at all, or were they just alone with their thoughts, alone in an oasis where she herself did not exist?

The worst part was always the not-knowing, so she forced herself to stop thinking on it. And anyway, if they did stare, they were more likely to be staring at Beast Boy than at her… All of a sudden she knew very clearly why he had changed into the hospital scrubs. Her fingers dug into the plush doll he had given her, whitening.

"Why do you _always_ have to be like that?"

Raven looked back down at her knees.

"…I don't know."

"Well…" he softened, "are you okay?"

_No._

"Yes."

"I don't think you really are," said Beast Boy, over the rumble of the bus's engine. "I think you're a liar."

"You're entitled to your opinion." She didn't need him to point out to her that she was doing it again.

"Look, I know you have to be all dark and creepy and 'everything is pointless' because of your powers, but –"

She cut him off. A small part of her was offended. "Maybe that's just the way I am. Did you think of that?"

"Dude, how would you know if you've never even tried to be different? You don't have your powers now. You could, you know, let loose!"

"What's the point?" she asked, suddenly full of aimless rage. "Why change when I'm just going to change back again once I regain my powers? It makes more sense to keep things as they are. Anything else is just setting myself up for disappointment."

"Yeah… I guess…" he replied slowly, after a moment. "… but you could just try to enjoy the time you have."

Incorrigible.

"You don't understand," was all she could think to say, deflating in her seat.

"Nobody ever does," said Beast Boy, with frustration. When she made no move to speak he returned to looking somewhat moodily out the window.

It was difficult to upset Beast Boy. So why was she so good at it?

Raven bit her lip on the inside, absently tightened her arms around the toy owl, and resumed the silent contemplation of her knees. The rest of the ride passed that way, until they reached their destination and Beast Boy nudged her out of her seat, seeming to have bounced back, as he always did, to a brighter mood.

When they stepped off the bus, they were on the corner of a long shopping street. On either side, merchandise spilled out into the walkway. There were more pedestrians than vehicles. Mostly, Raven was just glad they hadn't ended up at the mall.

"Alright!" said Beast Boy, full of energy. "Now we can get started!"

Raven did the customary thing and rolled her eyes. Weren't boys supposed to dislike shopping?

By tacit agreement, they both ignored the argument they'd had on the bus, as if it had never even happened.

Raven was an efficient shopper, and before they had left the first store she had found that Beast Boy was most emphatically not.

That was a shocker.

While Raven would have settled for picking items half at random and buying them straight off the shelf, it was Beast Boy who urged her into a dressing room, continually attempting to slip more outrageous clothing into the pile on her arm. She tolerated that for a time, until he somehow managed to find a tacky faux leather bustier and sneak it into her own selection.

If she'd had her powers she would have – But she didn't. So she stomped out of the dressing room and stuffed his head through the thing instead.

After that, Beast Boy turned to displaying his extreme lack of fashion sense to amuse himself. And no matter how many disparaging comments Raven made, he insisted on striking poses in the three-way mirror. She didn't know whether to laugh or pretend she didn't know him.

Sometimes, strangely, someone would approach him, or both of them, for an autograph. Raven signed her name with mild embarrassment – She wasn't any better now than anybody else, and had probably only been vaguely recognized because of who she was with. Beast Boy, on the other hand, preened under the attention. That, she supposed, was the difference between them. One of many.

At one point he tried to direct her towards a store that carried spiked bracelets, printed t-shirts, black bondage pants and the like.

"What makes you think I want to go in there?" she asked him, eyes narrowed dangerously.

"Uh…" he said, apparently realizing he was in too deep.

"Exactly."

And they moved on.

In the end, the trip was quite a bit longer than it would have been had she been by herself. She came out of the last store (what she hoped was the last store for a long time to come) wearing a pair of black cigarette pants and a soft black sweater. Not everything she had bought was that same color, but… well, a lot of it was. The uniforms, the borrowed clothing, and the toy owl had been relegated to the shopping bags with the other new purchases.

To Raven's surprise, Beast Boy came out looking half-decent. Instead of the atrocities he had flaunted in the various dressing rooms, he was dressed far more sensibly in jeans and a t-shirt. She hadn't thought it possible, but he appeared even more wiry without the muscle definition that his suit made visible.

"So…" said Beast Boy – she wondered if she still ought to call him that, even though he was out of uniform. She decided that she would. She wasn't about to start calling him Garfield, although perhaps if she practiced enough she would be able to say it without laughing. "… you wanna get something to eat?"

His stomach growled loudly, as if to punctuate, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, sheepishly.

When Raven thought about it, she realized she hadn't eaten all day. She felt a sort of empty tiredness take her over, and for a moment was forced to concentrate very hard on not swaying where she stood.

Beast Boy seemed to take her silence for a show of reluctance. "Please, just a quick bite? We can go back to the tower right after."

"O-okay," Raven agreed faintly. The tower. The others. She had almost forgotten, or at least relegated it all to the back of her mind. But it seemed to want to stay there, so she allowed it to. She would feel better, she decided, if she did get something to eat.

They ended up at the pizza shack, because that was the only thing they could agree on, but the rest of the day was sort of a blur to her. They ate outside at one of the circular plastic tables. The wind blew Raven's hair into her face. She finished her pizza, and rested her cheek in her palm. Across the table, Beast Boy was just starting on thirds.

The only moment she remembered – and this with absurd clarity – was the moment that Beast Boy looked up at her. He was in mid-bite, but suddenly he clicked his mouth shut, lowered the slice of pizza – vegetarian, no onions – down to the grease-stained paper plate, and cocked his head to the side. Oddly, he was still wearing his gloves.

Out of the blue he said, as if they had been discussing it the whole time, "Raven, we're friends, aren't we?"

She sat up at that. He looked back at her expectantly. A burst of wind stole one of the paper napkins she had tucked under her plate. Her cup, filled only with ice now, sweated onto the table.

"I think so," she said.

He nodded, and when his hair – a tad bit longer than it had been, and messier now, less deliberately spiked, still the same pine green that she had long ago ceased to notice as abnormal– when his hair flopped down over his eyes he brushed it back distractedly with one gloved hand. There were goose-bumps on his arms. His skin was downy and grass-green. He should have bought a jacket.

"I thought you should know that I – that we all care about you. We're all friends, you know? It doesn't matter if you… if you're not… I just thought you should know, in case you didn't know already."

Raven nodded mutely. Seemingly satisfied, Beast Boy raised his pizza again and took a large bit out of it.

I wanted you to know that I… care, too, she thought later. But at the time, she said nothing.

Raven dropped her head heavily back into her palm, one elbow propped up on the table. After a moment, she closed her eyes. If they talked about anything between then and their arrival at the tower – and they must have, because, to put it lightly, Beast Boy wasn't one for silences – she could not remember what it was.

* * *

A/N: Ok, it's **ranting time**, everybody. If you don't want to read my thoughts on the subject of Raven and shopping, **feel free to skip over**. Here we go –

First, I must admit, that the scenes of Raven and Beast Boy shopping are sort of a send-up of those stories where Raven goes out and buys fishnets and boots and low-cut tops and blahblahblah, usually from Hot Topic, which is a store that I hate with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. You know what I'm talking about. These types of stories rub me the wrong way because, number one – I don't believe that Raven is a goth or a punk, and number two – if you shop at Hot Topic or whatever, you are not a goth or a punk either.

I apologize if I offended anybody out there who really does shop at Hot Topic. However, this is clearly a subject I feel very strongly about.

:P Yeah.

I think you all know my thoughts on reviews already, but I'll say it again anyway – I heart reviews! Thanks for reading!


	5. v

V. Chapter Four

* * *

It was dark when Raven and Beast Boy returned to the tower, going in by the rarely-used ground entrance. Only with great restraint did Raven make it to the elevator without dispatching her pride and using Beast Boy as a crutch. As it was, she leaned heavily against the wall as soon as the elevator was moving up to the main floor and closed her eyes. 

Somehow she knew that Beast Boy was looking at her with concern, but she pretended that she didn't.

It was an odd feeling, coming back here. Raven thought of her leap from the window. It seemed to have happened forever ago. She remembered the urgency of that moment, but could no longer understand it.

"Raven –" said Beast Boy suddenly, and got no further. The elevator pinged, the doors wooshed open to the hall directly outside the living room, and no sooner than they had stepped out both he and Raven were corralled by the force of an ecstatic Starfire.

"Friends, you have returned unharmed! Glorious!"

Raven contemplated the incredible elasticity of Starfire's arms as the breath was slowly squeezed out of her.

"Starfire…" she wheezed, not sure how to get her to stop. She was saved from having to figure it out. Starfire let them abruptly loose and lumped them both on the head.

"How dare you leave without first notifying us!" She glared at Raven and Beast Boy, hands on hips, fire in her eyes. And the boys thought _Raven_ was the scary one… Over her best friend's shaking shoulder, Raven caught a glimpse of Robin and Cyborg, watching with wide-eyed awe and trepidation but not moving to interfere. Cowards.

"How dare you cause us to fear for your lives! How dare you –" Starfire caught sight of the shopping bags and gasped – "How dare you go shopping without me!"

In a flash, Starfire was rifling through the bags, holding up the items and giving little coos of admiration every so often. Raven didn't know why; there was a certain plainness to everything she'd bought. That was the way she liked it. Simple. Uncomplicated. Easy.

She sighed.

"_That's_ where you two have been all day? _Shopping?_"

Robin sounded angry. Oh, boy. Overwhelmed and exhausted, Raven decided to allow Beast Boy to field the questions.

"Well, not exactly _all_ day," he hedged.

"Yeah, what'd you do for the rest of the time?" said Cyborg archly, arms crossed over the broad expanse of his chest. His smirk was somewhere between amusement and irritation. "Go to the movies?"

Raven remembered that Beast Boy actually had suggested that at one point during their shopping, but seemed later to have forgotten it.

"Er…" he said. His eyes flicked towards her, and she realized he was wondering how much to reveal. She didn't know either. _Not very much_ was the answer that came always and immediately to mind. But, no, that wasn't really a possibility.

"And what happened here?" demanded Robin. "Why is the window all blown in?"

"Oh, that… Funny story…" Beast Boy laughed awkwardly. Robin glared. Cyborg rolled his eye. Raven noticed that the broken window had been boarded up, and the glass swept away, probably by Cyborg – for no discernable reason, many of the housekeeping duties fell to him.

"It was the thief from last night," Raven put in curtly, losing patience. She wanted – needed, rather – to get to bed. Her head felt like a watermelon, her body like a blade of grass. "He thought I did something to that jewel of his. He left. We left. We're fine. Everything is fine. We're all fine."

They all stared at her, even Beast Boy. She squashed the worm of embarrassment.

"I'm going to bed," she said and she tried to walk away, but all of a sudden Starfire was hovering before her, inspecting Raven's bandaged hand – the only visible injury – which she had taken into her own. Starfire had a warm touch, a wrenching, melting touch. _Spill yourself to me_, the touch said. Raven snatched her hand away.

Too much, too much, too much.

"Raven, you have been injured –"

"Yes," she said shortly. "And I'm going to bed."

She turned and walked away. She realized she had left the bags just sitting there a moment too late, and was too proud to go back for them.

"We'll talk in the morning," said Robin to her back. There was a hint of dissatisfaction in his voice.

"Uh… good night then, Rae." That was Beast Boy.

"Yes, I wish you most pleasant dreams," Starfire added.

And then Cyborg. "See ya in the morning."

There was a hitch in her step. Raven glanced over her shoulder at her friends.

"Get some sleep, Raven," said Robin, seeming to smile in spite of himself.

"Good night," she said, almost blankly.

When she reached her room, Raven collapsed into bed with her clothes on, asleep before her head hit the pillow.

* * *

"… How about this one?"

Raven shook her head. "No, go back to the other one."

Robin clicked a button, and the image projected onto the large screen before the computer subtly changed. He glanced over his shoulder at her, silhouetted in the blue light from the monitor. Raven realized that she wasn't sure whether or not there even were any overhead lights in the data room. Certainly Robin never seemed to use them.

"How's that?" he asked.

"As close as it's going to get."

Raven studied the image on the screen, her hands folded behind her back. It was a good likeness of the thief. The police would be able to recognize him with this, if they saw him on the street. In general the Titans didn't work too closely with the police force, for all that their jobs were the same. The Titans were the back up for special cases. It was always the police who did the actual arresting. But once in a blue moon, the two would work in tandem for a little while.

She stared at the rendering, blank eyes, flush lips, a bit gaunt in the face, and with a long, slender nose. Young and stupid. No matter how she turned it in her mind, he just didn't look like a criminal. But by that logic, she supposed, she didn't really look much like demon-spawn.

Seated at the terminal, Robin saved the image and swiveled in his chair to face her.

"I'll get Beast Boy in here to look it over before we send it out," he told her.

Raven nodded absently. She had woken up late, with full-blown daylight sneaking through the shades, and half-remembered dreams sliding thankfully away already into nothingness (she had forgotten to meditate before bed) and her shopping bags all dropped into the center of the room by somebody – she suspected Beast Boy; the stuffed owl had ended up next to her, but she had still been awake earlier than him. Some things never changed.

"How are you handling all this?" asked Robin, out of the blue. Raven wasn't surprised. She knew him well enough to know that even if he had not cared personally, he still would have asked out of duty as a team leader.

Robin was _obligated_ to care, which was a bitter thing, even though she knew better.

"…I don't know yet."

Over breakfast she had related the events of the previous day to Robin, minus the leaping out the window bit. She had grabbed hold of the board before the thief got that far, she said. Close enough to the truth, without the embarrassing details. She didn't tell him the full extent of her injuries, either. She didn't know why.

Robin was a good friend. Robin was trustworthy. If she had told anybody on her own, it would have been him. But she hadn't.

"Maybe you should find out." Robin stood up and placed a hand on her shoulder. It was very much a boy's hand, heavy, projecting heat through his glove and through the fabric of her loose turtleneck. Her eyes made a line from his face, to the hand, and back.

She knew it was a purely friendly gesture. She knew that Robin was entirely the property of Starfire. She knew it was supposed to comfort her, in some way. But she only felt distinctly uncomfortable with this display of emotion.

Get back, she thought. Don't touch me.

"We're not going to let you go, after all we went through to keep you," said Robin firmly. Raven was sure he was referring to the incident with Trigon. "We'll get your powers back. You know that."

The hand fell away from her shoulder. She breathed a sigh of relief.

"I know you will." Her tone lacked conviction.

Robin got results in part by believing that he would get results. Mind over matter. Somebody believed, and sometimes that was all she needed to hear. There was no comfort there now, though, only a firm knot of anxiety in the pit of her stomach.

"There's something you're not telling me."

Raven's heart leapt into her throat. What did he know? Her injuries? Her spectacular failure at heroism? How had he found out?

"W-what do you mean?" she asked.

"I don't know." He sighed, and pushed a hand through his immaculately gelled hair, which was in the beginning stages of growing out. "I just – you seem… distant."

Raven tried to say casually, "Don't I always?"

Robin wasn't laughing. "I wish you would open up to somebody, Raven – it wouldn't have to be me. Just anybody. I know you don't like to get too close, but… it would be good for you," he finished lamely. "I mean, nobody can be alone all the time – no, wait –"

Something twisted sharply inside her. Robin thought she was alone – and for him to actually _say_ it, just out it like that –

Why was she surprised?

"I don't think _you_ have the right to talk to me about opening up to somebody," Raven said abruptly. At times, Robin was just as closed-mouthed as she was, and he damn well knew it.

Robin's cloak swayed about him, a flash of the yellow lining in the dim light, as he shifted in agitation.

"Look, I didn't mean to say that you're alone – you're not. You have all of us, and I hope you believe that. We're all with you. It's just – most of the time you act like you are – alone, I mean."

She stared at him blankly. How, exactly, did he want her to respond to that? "I appreciate that you got out yesterday for a while," he continued, "and you spent some time with Beast Boy – I was surprised to hear that, you know. I didn't know you two could get along."

Words came only with effort. "Yesterday, that was –"

_"I'll do anything you want to do. I mean it."_

"– That was nothing."

"If you say so," said Robin simply, in a way that infuriatingly implied that he didn't really believe her.

She scowled at him. But that hardly seemed to work on anybody anymore.

"I'm just worried about you," Robin continued, when Raven remained silent.

"Don't be," she said.

He ignored her. He would never understand how seriously she meant it.

"Anyway, I wanted to take you back down to the museum today, so you can look around, ask questions, you know." He seemed not to see her stricken expression. "We checked it out yesterday, but you might see something we missed, and the curator said he was interested to meet you."

Go back to the museum? The scene of the crime? Thinking about it made her head pound.

Because she wanted her powers back without delving into the reason they had disappeared in the first place. She wanted most of all to remain in a kind of stasis until her powers returned, and she could simply pick up where she left off. She wanted not to have to think about a life beyond her powers. No, that would only complicate things, and she had always liked to keep it clean and simple. The idea of examining those gray areas of her own mind made her long for a return to black and dreamless sleep.

She realized, when she thought about it, that her life so far had evolved without much deliberation on her part. She had been born with dangerous powers, so she had been isolated. Her mother had died, so she had left Azarath. Robin and the others had appeared, so she had helped them. And here she was.

It wasn't that she didn't think at all, because she did a lot of that (and thinking was not to be confused with meditating, which was all about clearing the mind). But the truth was that when she thought about the things she had done, she didn't examine why she had done them. The truth was that she just didn't want to know.

Nobody had ever asked her if she wanted to be powerful. She had never had to choose, but she had done her best with what she'd been given, and it was too late to change it now. She didn't want that choice, or even the possibility of it. She wanted a life without complications. She wanted a life of gliding along the surface, easily, without making too many ripples or mucking up the water very much.

_'Easy, easy,'_ was what the monks, her teachers, used to say, when she was just learning the use of her powers and tended to burst objects instead of levitating them. _Easy, easy_. That was what she wanted. She was tired, and that was what she wanted. She didn't think it was too much to ask.

"What do you say to two o'clock?" Robin asked.

"O-okay," agreed Raven, weakly.

What did it matter what she wanted, after all? She was never going to get it.

"Good." Robin clapped her once on the shoulder. "Now, I'm going to go see if Beast Boy is up yet."

He walked out of the room with a purposeful swish of his cape and a strong air of efficiency. His steel-toe boots announced his presence as he clomped away down the hall. Raven, in her stocking feet, padded out after him and wandered off aimlessly in the opposite direction.

She felt like she was floating. It was a helpless kind of feeling, like a little twig boat, rushing along in the river without any volition of its own. The thief, the stone, her powers, where was she going and what was she coming to, just rushing on by.

And it had only been a day or so since it happened. It felt like a hundred years.

Raven looked up at the sound of the doors wooshing open. Somehow, without noticing it, she had walked to the living room and opened the doors. Well, she had nothing better to do, so she approached the kitchen table, where Starfire was drenching her 'meal of the oats' in mustard. Nearby, Cyborg was frying something that emitted greasy crackling sounds over the stove – probably bacon. He looked up from the frying pan as she came closer.

"Yo! Look who finally decided to show her face – late night, huh, Rae?"

Raven glared, even as she felt a flutter of affection.

"Good morning, Raven," Starfire chirped, turning to her happily. Her long red hair gleamed with perfection, and Raven was embarrassed to feel a spurt of petty jealousy. "Please join us in breaking the fast."

"O-okay." Raven pulled out a chair and collapsed onto it, almost clumsily. She felt out of sorts. The burn by her ribs, freshly wrapped and treated, gave a little burst of pain. Her mind seemed to drift into a soft haze, and she saw Robin's face again, lecturing her in the data room...

What do they think of me…? she wondered, and glanced up at Cyborg and Starfire. They were both staring at her expectantly, and she realized that Cyborg had spoken to her.

Raven shook her head to clear it. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"I said, what'll it be this morning, miss?" Cyborg grinned, adjusting his tall white chef's hat.

"Uh…" It seemed such an insignificant thing to decide. "I'll have anything."

"Bacon and eggs it is!" said Cyborg, and plopped a loaded plate down in front of her. A moment later, he hung up his chef's hat, and sat down with a plate for himself.

Raven looked dispassionately at her breakfast. She was not very hungry, but she ate a small bite anyway.

"Does the taste not please you?" asked Starfire, when she noticed that Raven had only picked at her food. "Perhaps you would enjoy a portion my meal better?"

Glancing at Starfire's mustard and oatmeal concoction, the knot in Raven's stomach tightened ferociously.

"No thanks," she demurred. "I just don't have much of an appetite."

"You know I'm always willing to help out a friend, don't you, Raven?" said Cyborg, with a toothy grin. Sighing, Raven pushed her plate towards him.

"Do you feel unwell this morning, Raven?" asked Starfire, peering into Raven's face. Raven wanted to draw back, but she made herself hold still.

"I feel fine, Star," she said. Her throat felt tight.

Starfire clapped her hands together happily. "Wonderful! Then you may advise me on a matter which has greatly troubled me."

"Oh, yeah," Cyborg put in, as if he had just remembered, "I'm gonna be sprucing up my baby later on – not that she needs it, heh – but if you want to help, my door's always open."

Raven stared at them. Oh, she knew when she was being babysat, and this was it. I know what you're up to, she thought. Why did they think she wouldn't know? Why were they trying to keep her in sight?

Did they know… that she had jumped?

No. How could they?

"You are not busy, are you, Raven?" Starfire asked.

It was then that Raven remembered, with a twist of anxiety, that Robin had planned to take her to meet the museum curator that day. It occurred to her that he might have been trying to keep an eye on her as well, but if that was the case at least he wasn't so obvious about it as Starfire and Cyborg.

Her head pounded. Going with Robin, staying with Starfire and Cyborg, all the same, not what she wanted. She wanted – like the round pools in the bronze floors of Azarath, the pebbles settled on the bottom and the water tranquil and still – she wanted it all to sink down and stay, and leave her clear and empty, a life without complications.

"Raven…?"

She screwed her eyes shut, hardly hearing. Her mouth seemed to move almost on its own, but she had nothing to say.

"I…"

Just then the doors opened, and Raven glanced over her shoulder, startled, to see Beast Boy come in sleepily, wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and plaid pyjama bottoms. She rolled her eyes, but she felt a rush of relief for the distraction.

"Hey, guys," he greeted them, shuffling over to the kitchen table. He wrinkled his nose. "What's that smell?"

"That's grade A bacon," said Cyborg, crunching demonstratively. "Mm-mm."

"Bleah." Beast Boy pulled a face. He stood at the table, not sitting down, and then he glanced at Raven, and seemed to forget that Cyborg was even there. Raven wasn't quite sure what to make of that.

"You look wiped out, Rae," he said. She blinked in surprise. "Didn't you… uh… sleep okay?"

An odd look passed across his face as he asked that. She didn't know what that meant. She didn't want to know.

"I slept fine," she answered, with a note of coolness.

"O-oh… okay…"

"Yeah, she's probably just tired out from that _date_ you guys decided to go on yesterday," Cyborg put in, grinning. Raven's gaze snapped in his direction. She felt her face go beet red.

"It's not – " she began at the same moment as Beast Boy said "We weren't – "

They looked at each other, and immediately away, hot with embarrassment.

Of course, Cyborg seemed to find the whole thing hysterical, and burst out laughing, so that Starfire had to laugh as well. Raven stood up to go, wishing more than ever that she could just open up a portal and escape. Tears leaked from Cyborg's eye, and Starfire giggled behind her hand.

"C'mon, it's not that funny," Beast Boy was saying.

That was when Robin came in.

He paused and raised one eyebrow. "Er… what's going on here…?"

Nobody had a chance to answer. The alarm went off, shrill and loud, with the red light washing over them.

Raven looked around at the faces which had turned grave, the bodies tense for action, and realized that she would not be going with them. She did not, like Robin, live and breathe to fight crime, but it hurt her just the same – more, in fact than she would have thought. Her heart seemed to drop to a deep and empty place. She gripped the back of her chair tightly.

"Let's go!" said Robin, taking charge immediately. He paused, when he noticed Beast Boy moving to follow with Cyborg and Starfire. "You stay here, Beast Boy."

"But –" Beast Boy started to protest. Robin held up a hand to stop him.

"You're still injured, and – well, you're not even dressed," said Robin, but his eyes also flicked to Raven, and he appeared to send a silent message to Beast Boy. Raven did not need her powers to know what the message was.

Her knuckles looked white as snow on the back of the chair.

"Okay," Beast Boy agreed with a firm nod.

When Raven looked up, she saw their backs as they walked away. It was all she could see, even as Starfire turned around and waved.

"Farewell, friends!" she said.

"Yeah, see ya," added Cyborg.

"We'll be back," Robin told them. His hand strayed to his communicator. "If anything happens…"

"Yeah, yeah," said Beast Boy, waving them out the door. "Get outta here, already."

Robin gave a half-smile in reply, and left. The door closed behind him, and to Raven the sliding shut had a sound of finality.

* * *

A/N: Alright, not a lot happening here, but these transition chapters are necessary, you know. Just wanted to show a little Titans love :) 

Next time: Raven takes a trip into her mind via the meditation mirror. I'm excited about this one, and you should be, too.

Thanks for reading, everyone! I hope you've enjoyed it.Reviews would be fabulous, really. No, I'm not just saying that.


	6. vi

vi. Chapter Five

* * *

Raven was often reluctant to leave the tower for a crime scene. Never before had she wanted to go as she did now, standing left behind in the kitchen with Beast Boy who was still in his mismatched pyjamas and bed-hair. She hadn't realized it would hurt so much. She was dead-tired of hurting. 

For perhaps the first time in her life, Raven wanted – wanted, not needed – to meditate, to clear it all away. She was surprised also to find that a small part of her was curious to see whether meditation would be any different without her powers. She felt like she had not been curious about anything for a very long time.

"So… you did sleep okay, then?"

Raven started at the sound of Beast Boy's voice and turned to look at him. Immediately the sight of the bandages wrapped around his palms jumped out at her. He was not wearing his gloves, and she wondered why she had not noticed it before. For a moment, Raven stared with a kind of fascination at his hands, bulky and blunt-ended, fingernails cut to the quick. Even those were a light shade of green.

It occurred to her that she did not know what had happened to make him that way. She had the vague notion that he had not been born a green shape-shifter, but – and Raven shut the door there, not willing to enter any further into the realm of curiosity.

No more complications, she told herself. Please, let there be no more.

"Raven…?" said Beast Boy, cutting into her thoughts. She realized she was still staring at his hands, and snapped her eyes up to his face. "Did you sleep okay?"

"I…" Raven frowned. A fog seemed to have wrapped around her mind, and she shook it off. "You asked me that already. I told you I slept fine."

"I know, I just thought… because you… erm – nevermind," he muttered finally, giving up. His shoulders drooped with resignation.

Raven sighed.

"Um…" said Beast Boy, casting about for something. "…Do you want to do anything?"

She looked at him. It was always startling to her, that in spite of all she had done to him, how cold she had been, he still…. Her heart contracted. She could not understand it.

"Is it okay…" she said softly, staring fiercely at the floor, a bloom of self-hate burning her up. "… is it okay if I be by myself for a while…?"

Briefly, Beast Boy looked surprised at the question, then – she made herself glance at him – disappointed. "O-oh, yeah – I mean, I have things to do, too…"

"Okay," Raven nodded, and turned her back on him to walk to the door. She felt like such an idiot.

"I – well, I'll be here, if you need me…" said Beast Boy, with a trifle of awkwardness. Her hand was on the control pad, but for a moment she did not move, seeing only the dark of her own shadow cast on the door in front of her.

"… okay."

And then she was in the hall, walking with quick, clipped strides. She felt as if she were running away, but she could not have said why.

Once in her room, Raven sagged against the door, head leaned back, eyes shut. There was only stagnant silence, and a great weight seemed to lift off her and flutter away. Alone, she could do whatever she chose – cry, shout, rage, stop pretending, stop it all. But standing in the darkness, nothing came… Well. Wasn't that what she had wanted, after all?

Raven shoved off the door and, neglecting the ceiling lights, moved across the dim room to open the blinds. She pulled each one up, flooding the room with sun. From the tower, the city appeared lain out like a little toy, light flashing against the tall structures and beetle-sized cars running across the bridge and tiny boats swallowed by the blueness of the bay. She leaned her arms on the window sill. She thought about Robin and the others. She thought about Beast Boy.

They had never been able to accept that she was not like them. She was not meant to be cared for – in fact, the very nature of her powers seemed designed to stomp out emotional attachments.

Raven saw her reflection in the window pane. She reached out haltingly, and touched her fingers to the glass. I don't have my powers now, she reminded herself.

But even before she came to earth, even before the Titans, her mother had… her mother who should have known best not to… her mother had loved her. Raven turned that over in her mind (her mother had loved her…?) and as she did she saw clearly the image of her mother, holding her, taking her by the hand, teaching her – and then, also, turning away from her in cold silence, watching her with a flat wariness in those gemstone eyes, leaving her behind and not looking back. Sometimes, Raven preferred not to remember that her mother had played both the nurturer and the distant idol.

A hard expression came across her face. I did idolize her, she thought. That is why I try not to remember… Did she love me at all?

Raven shook her head, pushing the thought away.

…It doesn't matter.

She left the window, and sat on the end of the bed, her feet on the floor. The shopping bags remained in a heap nearby. If she'd had her powers, she would have moved them to the closet with a quirk of her finger. She decided, for now, to leave them where they were.

A restless feeling came over her. Raven looked around the room, not ready to settle her mind just yet. As if of its own accord, one foot began to beat against the floor. For some reason, she glanced at her bureau. She saw the glint of her meditation mirror, lying benignly atop the chest of drawers.

She hadn't thought about that mirror – or perhaps had not allowed herself to think of it – since the night of the museum robbery. Now she wondered what would happen, if she were to… would it even work without her powers? It occurred to her that she might not be able to activate it at all.

On impulse, Raven stood up, took the mirror from the bureau, and sat again on the bed, cross-legged. She laid the ornate hand-mirror on the sheets in front of her. Dimly, she knew it was a bad idea, but she leaned over and peered in anyway, reaching for that familiar spot in her mind that would open the channels.

A half-surprised exhalation escaped her when it worked. She had a flash of premonition that read darkly of chaos, and then a great rushing seemed to rise about her. She was pulled in.

Blurs of color sped past her. It was like being in a tidal wave, and she was flying through it somehow, touching nothing. Thoughts like,

Where am I going?

What will happen to me?

seemed to drop behind, joining the blur, almost as soon they bubbled up, until she felt empty of them entirely. In the past, peering into her own mind like this had always intensified her emotions – now a crippling apathy seeming to wind around her. She closed her eyes then…

…and when she opened them she was standing knee-deep in a thick fog. The fog was drifting between the colors that had been tied to her emotions, red in some places, pink in others, yellow, green, orange. She could not see the ground. She could not see any of the surrounding area – for a moment she thought she glimpsed a pink range of mountains, but it might have only been a swirl of mist.

Had her powers always separated her emotions, then? Was this what the mind of a normal person would look like…? What if… what… The thought slid greasily away from her, almost seeming to make a trail through the fog, which closed up behind it.

Again, she thought she saw a bit of landscape, an orange stretch of forest, but it appeared as gently erratic as the mist, and was gone a moment later.

There was nothing else to do but take a step forward, and then another. Even as she walked she seemed not to move at all. She felt the mist swallow her footsteps.

Somehow, she was not surprised when a group of black birds swooped down in front of her. She had almost known it was coming. The birds had red eyes.

They gathered into one mass, and then when she looked at them she was seeing herself, but at a moment in the past. With horror she realized that it was the moment when she ran, it was the moment when she leapt out the window, powerless. Her cape was billowing hugely in the wind from the bay, but the mouse-brown hair looked incongruous with the rest of the uniform. She fell, she seemed to fall a thousand times, down into the bay, down onto the rocks below, onto the concrete city, down, she fell and splattered like a bug.

It could have happened. But it didn't.

"Don't show me this," she hissed, boiling with shame. The black birds dispersed, cackling to each other, perhaps cackling at her. In her throat she made a noise of disgust.

"Why did you come here?"

She whirled around at the sound of the voice, and found herself startlingly close to a figure in her own image, floating like a ghost, seeming to be formed of serenely yellow diaphanous mist.

"I came… seeking answers," she said, hardly knowing why.

The figure became an evil red and swooped close to her, close enough that she felt as if she were breathing it in. "Tell yourself the truth," it murmured, in a sand-paper voice.

"I couldn't stand to be left behind again," she blurted. The fog seemed to become thicker, pressing in on her with warmth. She wanted to close her eyes. She did. All around her a typhoon of rustling feathers, and she saw a long-ago image of her child-self on Azarath, in the room that the monks gave her.

The child-self fumbled through a low-level meditative chant, looking again and again towards the single window in the austere little room, wanting in some way to fly out like a bird. Cracks appeared in the plaster, the chair flew violently out from underneath the desk and across the room. The child-self attempted the chant again.

"That was the day Arella left us," said the figure softly in her ear, now colored a pale gray. "Don't you remember?"

She turned away. "I don't want to remember that."

"But it happened."

"I don't care."

"That choice is always yours," said the figure, withdrawing from her. "Run away, if that's what you want."

She stared with hard eyes at the figure, riding a swell of indignation.

"I'm not running away. I know my own mind," she said, as strongly and clearly as she could. The fog seemed to cool and dissipate around her.

"I know you do," the figure replied with an indulgent smile, blushing into rosy pink, "it is your heart you are estranged from."

"What…?"

Then she could see the scene of that morning in the kitchen, herself with her back to Beast Boy, walking away. Over and over, she walked away. What, exactly, was she walking away from?

Brushing against her, in a voice like a whisper, "You don't have to be alone, if you don't want to. That was the choice you made…You promised yourself not to fall in love, to love nobody at all."

She pushed away the memory, barely listening. "Don't show me this."

The image vanished. Nothing, now, but mist and color. There was a whole world here, once.

"Tell me what happened here," she said, diverting herself from that previous subject. "What's beyond the fog?"

"Darkness," sighed the figure, almost longingly.

She shuddered.

"Show me."

The figure hesitated, made a sweeping gesture with its arm, and they stood suddenly before a great, solid blackness. They had not moved, but it felt as if they had crossed a great distance. She looked up at the darkness. Somehow, it was familiar to her. She reached out and pressed her hand to it. It was solid and warm and quivering like the side of some sleeping giant.

Drawn forward, she placed her other hand to it, leaned in as close as she could. She felt a pulse that seemed to match her heartbeat. A desire to possess that pulse overcame her. She raised her eyes to the blackness, but it was solid and seemed to stretch on indefinitely into the mist with no way over or around it.

Yet, when she looked to the left, there seemed to be something – not an opening, she knew instinctively, but a darkness that was separate from the warm and pulsing thing in front of her. The other darkness was smaller, denser, and it was… dead. A heavy, hanging thing, like a tumor.

"What is that?" she asked, turning to look at the figure.

"I do not know."

The answer chilled her. She did not want to stay here any longer. A ringing sound seemed to vibrate the base of her skull.

_Raven…_

She looked up, but the figure appeared not to have spoken.

_Raven…_

"Take me away from here," she tried to say. The words did not come. Suddenly it all disappeared, the fog and the darkness and the figure, into a pale nothingness. She felt as if a great hand were grabbing her, and hoisting her away.

Raven opened her eyes.

For a moment, she did not know where she was. She brought a hand up to shield her eyes, shrinking from the sunlight. In the brightness, a dark shape…

"_Raven!_"

It spread its wings, and was gone, the dark shape of a bird in the brightness.

There was an abrupt pounding on the door, and Beast Boy's voice on the other side. She remembered suddenly that she was in her room. The meditation mirror sat on the bed in front of her.

"Raven, I'm opening the door, if you're not gonna answer!"

She shoved the mirror guiltily beneath her pillows and out of sight before the door slid open and revealed Beast Boy silhouetted in the frame. He had changed into his uniform, on his face an expression of immense concern, which melted and reformed into puzzlement at the sight of her, sitting perfectly fine on the bed.

"When you didn't answer, I thought…" He rubbed a hand up and down his forearm self-consciously. "Why didn't you answer?"

For a long moment, Raven did not know what to say. She stared at Beast Boy in the way she had stared at his hands earlier that morning, only this time at his whole body. His face, which had become leaner with age, his shaggy hair and expressive eyes, the lithe build, like a swimmer, all wiry muscle and narrow waist. He really was a bit taller than her now, Raven realized with a kind of pang.

"Raven…? Hello?"

"I was distracted," she answered, shaking herself to cover-up the fact that she'd been staring. "I didn't answer because I was thinking about something. I'm fine."

"Oh," said Beast Boy, still with a look of puzzlement. "Um…"

"What are you doing here?" asked Raven, to move the attention away from her as she scooted to sit on the edge of the bed, with her feet on the floor. It worked. Beast Boy seemed to recall his original purpose.

"The others are back, and, well, you should come see…"

"They're back already?" she said, surprised. It felt almost as if no time had passed at all, and that they were back now… She felt foolish for having allowed herself to hurt so badly at their leaving. That was why she had looked into the mirror in the first place.

_"Run away if that's what you want."_

She just didn't want to hurt anymore. She didn't think there was anything wrong with that.

Beast Boy gave her an odd look. "…Uh…It's been three hours, Rae. What were you doing in here?"

"Reading," she answered steadily. For some reason, she did not want him to know about her look inside the mirror.

"… and you say _I'm_ weird." Beast Boy shook his head, smiling, but Raven pressed her hand into the bedding and frowned at her knees.

"Beast Boy…" she began. There was no clear path to follow here. She felt as if she were treading on something soft and tender. Beast Boy was watching her with his head cocked just slightly to one side. "… I… I wanted to say I'm sorry. And… thank you."

"For what?" asked Beast Boy. She did not know what he thought of her then. She knew she was acting strangely.

"Nothing," said Raven immediately, then made herself continue, "I mean – everything. I don't know."

She let out a sigh, allowed her shoulders to slump, the charged-ness of the moment draining out of her. She put her hands on her knees and stared at them. She was wearing loose gray slacks. When she looked at them, all she could think of was being out in the city yesterday with Beast Boy. How bizarrely normal that had been. She couldn't remember the last time she had felt like an ordinary person…

All of a sudden the memory came to her. Her mother, in one of the jovial moods that seemed to filter in and out of her, pass through and unpredictably return, a fish in the reeds, in one of those moods her mother had taken her out to the park, held her hand, bought her a cherry ice and her lips were red, red roses for an hour after. But that had been very shortly before… left behind in the cloisters… and her mother must have known even then what she was about to do to her only daughter…

The weight of Beast Boy's hand on her shoulder, the sense of his closeness, called Raven back to reality. Her eyes refocused on her white hands gripping the knees of her gray slacks. She did not have to look up to know that Beast Boy was standing before her, arm outstretched to touch her, hand resting just so on her shoulder, warm and breathing through the rough glove-skin, breathing gently into her.

"It's okay," he told her. She believed him.

Raven did not know what would have happened then, if Robin had not walked in.

"Raven, are you alright…?" he asked, appearing in the open doorway and stepping through. Immediately, Beast Boy withdrew his hand and whipped around to face Robin. Raven stood up on reflex. She felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under her. With a certain amount of wonder, she realized that she had not wanted Beast Boy to pull away. She had not wanted that at all. Why…?

"Raven?"

Raven gathered her thoughts. "I'm fine, Robin," she said, a little crisply. "How did… how did it go?"

It did not escape her when Robin and Beast Boy shared a significant look.

"What is it?" she asked, with a swell of foreboding.

"When we got there," Robin began hesitantly, which wasn't like him, "there was nobody around, and we realized where we were – we were at the old city library… you know the one…."

A chill passed through her.

"That place is still standing?" she asked, swallowing thickly.

"Well… it was when we got there. It was always slated for demolition, but the city didn't want to touch it for a while after… um. The demolition got held up, anyway –"

"Maybe you should just show her," Beast Boy interrupted.

Robin paused, then nodded shortly. "You're right. It'll be better if you come see…" He gestured toward the open doorway.

Raven allowed herself to be lead down the hall to the living room. Robin kept glancing back at her, as if afraid she would disappear. A knot formed in her stomach that made it difficult to breathe. Beast Boy trailed behind her. Raven could feel his eyes on the back of her neck, but did not turn to look at him.

When they reached the living room, Starfire and Cyborg were standing over something that was spread out on the kitchen table. They both looked up as Robin, Raven, and Beast Boy entered the room.

"Raven –" Starfire began, but faltered and did not continue. Raven looked at Starfire and Cyborg, and then was struck suddenly by the raggedness of their clothing, and the smudges of charcoal on their skin. Cyborg's armor looked scuffed up, and Starfire's long, luxurious hair was tangled and wind-blasted. There was a tear in the front of her skirt. Raven's eyes darted to where Robin was standing and she saw that he, too, was looking worse for wear.

She hadn't noticed earlier. It had never occurred to her that they might be injured. It had never occurred to her because she had been too wrapped up in her own problems to think about them. Raven fought off a stab of guilt.

"Are you guys alright?" she asked, trying to make up for it.

"We are unharmed," Starfire answered.

"Yeah, it was only the one building that blew up in our faces," said Cyborg, waving a hand with nonchalance. "No biggie."

Raven's eyes widened. "The library blew up?"

"Almost as soon as we got close," said Robin, coming up to stand by the kitchen table and stare down at the thing that was resting on top of it. "And when the dust died down, we found this in the rubble. It was… glowing. We think this must be connected somehow to the explosion…"

Raven had stopped listening. She had come close enough to the table to see the thing on top of it, a large piece of stone that looked like it had come from the outer façade of the old library. A symbol was carved into the surface, by magic not by hand – she could tell from the smooth cleanness of the lines – a symbol which was very clearly a deviation of the Mark of Scath. And in fact, as she stared at it with a slowly creeping horror, she could see in her mind's eye the symbol burning a fiery red and then ripping the old library to pieces.

Raven shivered. She felt herself break out in a cold sweat, and had to lean against the table in order to stand through the wave of dizziness that washed queasily over her.

"Raven? What is it?"

She shook her head.

The old library had been the shell of an evil place, the nexus of Trigon's arrival on earth. Raven was glad to see it go, the memories there scattering wide, sizzled to dust in the blast, but the symbolism in the gesture was glaringly obvious – destroying the darkness. And the Mark of Scath with the exaggerated slash through it that was a connotation for death in the written language of Azar…

Raven knew the symbol that was engraved in the stone. The harder she stared at it, the more she was sure it was something from her home world. It fit into her mind like a puzzle piece, but when she tried to think of it she was met with a disturbing blankness. There were no memories attached to this symbol.

Only – something hit her – a cool pressing of lips to her forehead, her mother saying, I'll protect you, little bird. Do not fear.

But… protect her from what?

Raven could not remember.

"Raven… are you alright? Do you recognize the mark?"

"No," she said after a tense silence, "not at all."

* * *

A/N: Hello, Plot Twist. 

Was the old library eventually destroyed during the Trigon arc? I can't remember, but if so... just pretend it never happened :P

As always, your reviews were lovely, everyone. Thanks so much! I hope you're all still enjoying the story enough to review again :D

And incidentally, am I the only one who doesn't hate the pagebreaks? I always seem to be reading anti-pagebreak sentiments in a lot of authors' notes, but personally I'm just fine with them. Very curious.


	7. vii

Chapter Six

* * *

"So," said Beast Boy, holding up a finger, "Robin, Star, and Cy get an alert – the police had been _anonymously_ tipped off – and they end up at the deserted part of town, which is _not_ _suspicious at all_, by the way. Nothing seems to be amiss, so they poke around the area, Cy does some scanning, but nothing comes up. _Then_ they decide to check out the library, and it literally blows up in their faces, and now we have this charming little centerpiece for our kitchen table." By that he meant the piece of rubble with the marking. Beast Boy folded his arms and nodded to himself in smug satisfaction. "I believe that covers everything, doesn't it?" 

"Uh…" Robin raised an eyebrow. "More or less…"

"Well, the answer is obvious, then," said Beast Boy.

"It is?" asked Starfire, confused. "I do not see it."

"Yeah," Cyborg added, giving Beast Boy a look of skepticism. "Why don't you explain it to us, genius?"

Beast Boy scratched a spot on the back of his neck. "I would, but why steal Robin's thunder? Go ahead, Rob, this one's all yours."

Robin sighed. His gaze shifted restlessly about the room as he spoke, as if he were trying to pluck the truth from thin air.

"Well," he started, the little notch between his brows deepening in thought, "the way I see it, two things have happened in the last two days – the museum robbery, and the explosion. I won't even go into the thief's attack on the tower. And both of those things seem to have something in common. Don't you think so, Raven?"

They were all standing around the kitchen table and the stone slab with the death-mark. Raven was the only one seated, at the end of the table, her head in her hand, fingers tangling the short brown hair. She stared at the piece of rubble. Her mind seemed to spin, turning it all over, digesting, but she couldn't make anything out of it and she couldn't remember where she had seen the mark before or if she had seen it at all.

When Robin addressed her, she looked up from the stone for the first time since she had come in. She felt broken-down. Her injuries throbbed. Even as she stared at him, her eyes were looking backwards, into the past, where there was nothing but mist and the dark place of forgetting.

"What you're saying," said Raven finally, "is that the events are connected."

"That's what I'm saying," Robin nodded.

"I guess that much is obvious." Raven screwed her eyes shut for a moment and rubbed.

"They both go back to you. Do you have any idea why these things are happening?" he asked.

"No," she answered hollowly.

"We've been over this already, man," Cyborg interjected, glancing at her. His voice seemed to come from somewhere far away. "Maybe you should just drop it."

Robin wasn't listening.

"Are you sure you don't remember anything about this symbol?" he asked again, leaning one hand on the table, leaning a bit closer to her. Intimidation tactic. He probably didn't even realize he was doing it, but Raven did.

"_Yes_," she hissed in a flare of defiance. So what if they didn't trust her? So what, so what…

Robin pulled back. "I'm sorry, Raven, it's just – you've hidden things from us before. I want you to feel like you can tell us anything…"

"Yes, Raven," said Starfire, approaching her from Robin's other side. "We are your friends, are we not? We will listen to you."

Raven stared them for a long moment. All the feeling seemed to drain out of her.

"I do trust you," she said slowly, standing up. "Do you trust me?"

"Of course we do," Robin replied, and the others nodded in assent.

Her voice hardened. "Then please believe me when I say _I don't remember_. I wish I had something useful to tell you, but there's nothing. There's just nothing there." She shook her head. "All I know is this – you recognize the Mark of Scath, don't you? This line here –" Raven traced a finger over the sweeping slash that cut across Scath's symbol " – On Azarath, you draw a mark like that over the name of somebody who is dead."

"…Or somebody you want to be dead." Robin leveled his gaze at her.

"That's right," said Raven heavily, dropping her eyes to the table top. "Obviously, the target here was Trigon, but he's not around anymore…"

"So they're after you," Beast Boy murmured, voicing the thought that had begun to take root in her mind.

Raven's eyes darted in his direction. He was giving her a hard, fierce look. She glanced away.

Robin toyed with the idea. "Then it could be that the museum robbery was just a ploy to weaken Raven… that the jewel was a weapon to use against her..."

"That doesn't make sense," said Cyborg. "If that were the case, why didn't the thief just kill her when he came to the tower? He had the perfect opportunity."

"Perhaps he made a mistake…?" Starfire suggested.

"Maybe," Cyborg replied, with a note of skepticism in his voice. "But in that case, whay go through the trouble of staging the museum robbery at all?"

Robin growled with frustration. "We just don't know enough yet. I'm going to go ahead and send that rendering of our thief to the police – Raven, we'll go to the museum curator tomorrow. Now –"

"Wait," said Raven, swallowing a welling-up of tension at the idea. "Before we do anything else we should get rid of this – this thing." She gestured toward the piece of rubble.

"Why?" Robin asked.

"Depending on what spells are on it, it could be used to – I don't know – listen in on us, or even gain access to the tower."

"There are spells that can do that?" said Cyborg, raising his eyebrow.

Raven shot him a dark look. "There are spells that can do anything."

"How 'bout a spell for that attitude?" he muttered, but with Cyborg she always knew he didn't really mean it. He filled the space in her life thatshe supposeda brother might have taken.Raven chose not to listen.

"Right," said Robin, bringing everyone back to business. "We'll destroy it, then, and – Raven, since the enemy seemsconnected toyour home world, are there any wards you could put up to protect the tower?"

She had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. "I could try, but… I won't be able to reinforce any of them, so they would only be as powerful as they are inherently. And if whoever did this really wanted to invade the tower, I don't think a simple ward could stop them."

If she'd had her powers, she might have been able to create one strong enough. But… no use dwelling on that.

"We can try it anyway," said Robin. Then he looked around at all of them. "Let's get to work."

The rest of that day was spent in a flurry of activity. Raven put up the wards, but she didn't have much faith in them. After that she attempted to research the symbol in her old books, but she wasn't surprised when she found nothing.

At the end of the day, she felt the kind of hopelessness that she hadn't experienced since Trigon had come to earth. She sensed that she could do nothing to stop this – the symbol, her powers, death, winding all together and carrying her away. Especially now, she could do nothing to stop it.

The monks used to say, so long ago now, _what will come, will come_. And it was a terrible thing, but Raven believed them.

* * *

The museum curator was an elderly man, but it seemed misleading to describe him as such. Although his hair was white, his skin finely wrinkled, there was a look of athletic strength about him and he stood straight and tall. He wore a crisp gray suit, and everything about him looked clean. His name was Allen Darber. 

Raven looked blandly at him when he smiled in greeting – his smile was uncomfortable, as if rarely used – and Robin, who had accompanied her as he said he would, offered his gloved hand.

"Welcome, welcome," said the curator, Mr. Darber, ushering them into his office. "We may speak privately here. Please, take a seat."

There were two chairs before the great oak desk, which Mr. Darber sat behind. Robin and Raven took the chairs offered to them. Looking about the room, Raven could see shelves filled with books and other curious odds and ends lining most all the wall-space.

Mr. Darber steepled his finders and peered down at them. "I have, of course, looked over the museum's files on the stolen item – to be frank, they are largely incomprehensible. I was not aware that any of our records had been left in such a state by my predecessor. Before this, I have had not occasion to look over the information on this particular item…."

"May we see these records," said Robin. It was not a question.

If Mr. Darber was phased at all, he did not show it. "Certainly. I have already ordered my staff to prepare copies, but I don't know how much use you will have for them. There is very little information to be found – where the item was discovered and when, I do not know. All we can say for sure is that the item is a ruby of great size, but I begin to doubt even that after what has happened."

Raven looked sharply at Robin. He had told the curator about her powers…? She felt a sting of betrayal, but… what did it really matter, anyway? She wondered why she was even there. Surely Robin could handle this on his own.

"What do you think happened?" asked Robin.

"I could not begin to tell you," Mr. Darber sighed. He looked at Raven "But the girl is much changed, is she not?"

Raven had not cared a great deal about the proceedings until then, wanting distance and solitude and clarity. But at those words she looked up at the curator, frowning fiercely. Mr. Darber was smiling his uncomfortable smile, and there was a gleam of intense interest in his eye. He leaned forward a bit, as if he could not contain himself.

"Please," he said to Raven, "I am most interested to hear, from your perspective, what it was that occurred here two nights ago."

Raven glanced sideways at Robin. He nodded slightly at her. She turned back to the curator and narrowed her eyes.

"What do you mean by that?" she asked, not willing to trust him.

Mr. Darber leaned back in his chair. He sighed. "To think that an object of such power sat in this very building for years – and we all thought we had it pegged for what it was. To have what seemed a sure thing proved false – actually, it is a trifle embarrassing. But it causes one to wonder, what else could be out there, hiding before our very eyes?"

He turned to address Robin. "I assume that, once recovered, the artifact will not be returned to this museum, correct?"

Robin shook his head. "We can off you a compensation…"

"Later, later," said Mr. Darber, holding up a hand. He looked back to Raven. "It seems I can no longer claim to have a professional interest in the item, so call it a – personal curiosity, if you will. I simply wish to know, so I ask you once more, would you tell me what happened to you here?"

Raven stared at him. "Why should I?" she asked bluntly.

"_Raven_," said Robin, glaring at her. She glared right back with a swell of righteous anger.

"He has no information for us. He said so himself. So why should we – why should I have to tell him anything? There's nothing to gain here. You could have just collected the files and left."

There. She'd said her piece. There was a grim satisfaction that came with that. Not enough to loosen the knot in her stomach, though. She felt sick. Her injuries ached, but she hadn't brought any extra painkillers. In her mind's eye she could see the spot where it hadhappened, and that made cool, wet chills run through her. She had passed that spot on the way to the curator's office. It was difficult to miss.

Why was she here? Why had Robin brought her along at all?

"Raven, we don't have anything to lose, either," said Robin. She wanted to hit him. More than that, she wanted to get back to the tower, to her painkillers and her books and her quiet places.

"There's not a lot to tell," she said after a moment, folding her arms peevishly. "I tried to use my powers on the ruby, then I blacked out. When I woke up, my powers were gone."

Behind the desk, Mr. Darber raised an eyebrow. "Riveting."

"That's all there is," Raven shrugged. Whatever Robin said, she would not go into the absent memories, the mysterious symbol, all that chaos.

"Are you certain?" asked Mr. Darber. "You remember nothing more?

"Nothing," Raven told him.

"Strange," murmured Mr. Darber, stroking his chin in thought. "Most interesting."

"And you don't know what it could be?" Robin asked.

Mr. Darber shook his head. "Unfortunately, no. I had hoped one of you might have some insight that would… put the pieces into place, so to speak."

"I'm sorry we couldn't be of much help," replied Robin, looking pointedly at Raven. What did he want from her?

Mr. Darber inclined his head politely. "I will have the files brought up for you."

"Those files… they were put together by the previous curator, weren't they?" said Robin. "Is it possible that he knew something that he didn't put down on record?"

"If he did, he has taken the secret to his grave," Mr. Darber sighed. "Most unfortunate. But considering the state of the records on this item in particular, it is a logical assumption that perhaps some things were meant to be kept hidden. Then again, he was a very old man when he died, and I think we should not come to conclusions so hastily."

"How long ago did he die, if you don't mind my asking?"

"No, I did not know the man personally. It's close to six months now – you see, I have not had time to look over all of the records myself. I did not know any of them were left in such disarray…"

"We understand," said Robin, but Raven was only half listening. "Thank you for your time."

"You're most welcome," Mr. Darber smiled. "And I invite you to return to speak with me any time you please."

Raven already knew that was not going to happen. Just down the hall was the place where the jewel had sat. She itched all over, suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to leave this place and the curator and the pounding in her head. However, she was forced to sit through several more minutes of small talk before Robin finally collected the files that they needed.

Walking out of the museum, Raven's strides were long and quick. Robin almost had to jog to keep up, but she did not care whether he did or not.

"I know how difficult it must have been for you to come back here," Robin said, as they climbed into the car they had taken. Robin was in the driver's seat. "But you could have been more helpful."

Raven stared out the window. Her reflection in the glass was startling. Brown eyes, brown hair – funny, that. She had always imagined it would be black in a situation like this.

"I don't see how. I told him the truth."

"Fine," said Robin, skirting the issue. "How are you feeling?"

She closed her eyes. Things washed over her, and away. Out the window, the city rushed on by.

"Why did we meet with him?" she asked. "We don't know anything now that we didn't know before."

Robin sighed heavily. "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to…. But if you ever do, I… I'm here."

Raven bit her lip.

"Anyway," he went on, putting aside the moment, "it's best to leave no stone unturned. We need to be as thorough as we possibly can."

"Okay," she said, quietly.

* * *

Raven resented her friends' attempts to keep an eye on her. Most of the time it was painfully obvious what they were trying to do. And she had no desire to be anybody's burden, to be cosseted and cared for like a little child. She had never been a child like that. 

It had taken her long enough to let her friends into her solitary life. She did not want them intruding any further.

But…

"So then I showed him that the controller had been unplugged the whole time," Cyborg paused above the open hood of the T-car and laughed at the memory. "It didn't make a difference! – hey, hand me the socket wrench, would ya?"

Lulled by the sound of his voice, Raven absently handed him the tool – he accepted it without even looking up from what he was doing. Sometimes he would ask her to help, but the rest of the time she would sit cross-legged atop one of the many storage crates and listen to him talk.

He told her funny stories, usually at the expense of Beast Boy, or he ranted about Robin, or whatever else was on his mind. She didn't have to say much, and that was the way she liked it and Cyborg didn't seem to mind it either.

"This one time, last April Fool's, me and Robin were trying to set up the GameStation so that B.B. would be rigged to lose –" here Cyborg stopped to fiddle with a few things about the engine "– And I told Robin not to touch the blue wires or the red ones, but…" he chuckled in reminiscence, "… Mr. Leader went ahead and did it anyway – his hair stood on end all over, like a – a Chia-Pet. Screamed like a little girl, too – no offense, Rae."

"None taken," she responded mildly. Staring at the garage floor, slick with oil and grease spots, she thought about Robin. She thought about things he had said to her.

"Cyborg…" she began, after a moment, "Do you think that I… that I act like I'm alone?"

Cyborg stopped working on the engine to look at her. "Who said that? Robin?"

Raven said nothing. Her eyes flicked to the side. Cyborg nodded and glanced back down at the car.

"I dunno, Rae. You're a pretty private person…"

She rolled her eyes, feeling bitter. "I'll take that as a yes."

But Cyborg slammed his hand down on the side of the car. His eyes burned holes in her, and she shrank back. "It's not like that, okay? Why d'ya gotta take it like that? Even when you blow us off, or stay shut up in your room, or whatever, we're still your friends. So just…" he sighed, and there was a great release of tension, "it doesn't even matter – Robin's an idiot."

Raven stared hard at the floor. "I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I never looked at it that way."

"S'okay," Cyborg shrugged his massive shoulders.

She shook her head. "No, it's not."

"Hey, hand me the plyers for a minute," he said, seeming not to hear.

* * *

"I cannot understand! In what manner have I been mistaken?" exclaimed Starfire, hands on her hips. It was evening, and the last of the sunlight was hitting the roof of Titan's Tower, and making everything golden. Starfire stood before a row of tiny, potted gardenias, each with an offering of meat before it, big slabs of steak that had probably belonged to Cyborg. The flowers were wilted, some turning to brown, dry husks. The steaks looked unhealthily green. 

"Um…" said Raven, for want of anything else. "Starfire…"

"Although I have prepared the offering of sustenance, no consumption has occurred! Perhaps it was the substitution of earthly meat for the customary roasted okarens? But I have not heard of any okarens on this planet, so I have concluded that must not be the case. Friend Raven, please advise me – I believe that my potted plants do not wish to live!"

Raven put her head in her hand and rubbed her eyes.

"Why did you bring out the steaks, again?" she said finally, not entirely sure that she wanted to know.

"On Tamaran that is the way we tend to our plant life," Starfire explained, as though it were common knowledge. "An offering of meat must be placed out, so that the plant will not accidentally consume other organic matter or life forms… This is not the proper way to care for seedlings of earth?"

"Not exactly…" said Raven, trying to imagine the carnivorous plant life of Tamaran.

Starfire clasped her hands together. "What must I do?"

"Well, first you should get rid of the rotting meat," Raven told her. "All they really need is sunlight and a little water."

"That is all…?" Starfire echoed, looking at the gardenias with a little bit of awe. "So simple – the Earth is truly a wondrous planet!"

A long moment passed, and then Raven smiled.

* * *

She did not want them intruding any further. Good things could not last, and it was useless to try to forget. 

The monks used to say at prophecy, so long ago now, _what will come, will come_.

* * *

A/N: Another one of those transition chapters, kind of. I wanted to get a little of Raven's relationships with the other titans, so there you go. Also, I think Raven is a pretty fatalistic character, at times (like when she knocked out all the other titans and went with Slade to summon Trigon in 'The End'),so she's feeling a little hopeless right now. Things are spinning out of her control.

Thanks for all reviews! Every author loves to hear some feedback, and you guys are great, really. Please let me know what you think. I'd be very interested to know :)

Next time: Expect the unexpected...


	8. viii

viii. Chapter Seven

* * *

A week went by with the queer feeling of limbo about it. For Raven, time seemed not to pass at all. Each day went on like the one before, and she went into a kind of stasis, where she divorced herself from the feeling of futility and tried to enjoy the time with her friends, where she grew more and more numb to the alarm calling the Titans to the city.

Beast Boy was most often the one to stay behind with her. But she didn't mind because, unusually, of all the Titans he pestered her the least about her feelings.

Sometimes he looked pensively at her, though, opened his mouth as if to speak, and then said nothing, and she could not decide which was worse.

She could not bring herself to participate in the search for clues about the thief, the jewel, or the marking. No word had come from the police concerning the sketch of the thief.

Her injuries grew steadily better, but hardly at the rate that they would have healed if she had her powers. She dressed them in the morning and at night – they twinged sometimes during the day. Tender blisters had formed on the damaged skin. However, Beast Boy's hands were almost good as new already, and when she thought about that, when she thought about the incident at all, she felt a hot rush of shame.

Raven was glad when she realized she did not know what had happened to the shirt and shorts that she had borrowed that day. She wanted to put that all behind her and bury it in the dark.

Unfortunately, it was not long before the borrowed clothing resurfaced. On a lazy Saturday morning, while she was idling on the sofa, waiting without much hurry for something to inevitably occur, Beast Boy approached her with the shirt and shorts in hand.

"So, you wanna run an errand?" he asked, leaning over the back of the couch and waggling his brows suggestively at her. Raven made a noise of contempt. "C'mon," he pressed, "I even washed them so we could take them back – well, Cy washed them, anyway. But it took a lot of effort to get him to do it, so now we can't just let them sit around the tower..."

Raven looked blankly at the clothing, remembering. The skin beneath her bandages began to itch. She thought about falling, falling with nothing to stop her and burning up all over, like a meteor dropping out of the sky to impact with death. A knot of anxiety formed in her stomach. She was pitched back to that moment of utter idiocy.

"Dude, do you wanna go, or not?" Beast Boy asked again, when she had not answered after a moment.

"Why would I want to do that?" she said irritably, jarred back to reality.

Like with the museum, she did not want to go back to the apartment building. A small part of her knew that she would anyway, that it was not something she could put off for long, that, try as she might, nothing ever was.

Beast Boy bent further over the edge of the sofa. "Because if you say no, I'll have to start wheedling, and I don't think either of us wants to go there."

Raven leaned back into the pillows, drawn into the valley where Beast Boy's arms pressed down into them. No, she didn't want to go there. She didn't want to go anywhere. She remembered the flurry of days before the final emergence of Trigon, how time had seemed to move against her, carrying her on into uncertainty. She felt a bit like that now, wanting time to slow this moment, crystallize and keep silent and still. If she looked ahead she could see Beast Boy's shoulder in the corner of her vision, feel the warm gravity of another body, the soft huff of breath.

"We could go out for pizza afterward, or I'll even go to one of your creepy cafes if you want," he offered cajolingly.

Raven looked down at her hands, folded over her lap. Small and white, for once the same pale flesh-tone of her mother's hands. She had a memory of Arella, taking up her round child fingers, brushing solemn kisses across her knuckles, but she had not known then, or could not remember, why she did it. Raven looked at her hands. One of them was bandaged. She swallowed thickly.

"Alright," she said finally, softly, giving in.

"Really?" Beast Boy asked, surprised. He almost dropped the small pile of clothing.

"You'd better go tell Robin that we're leaving before I change my mind."

"O-okay," he said, withdrawing from the couch. "Be right back – don't go leaving without me, now."

Beast Boy didn't see it, but she smiled a little bit at that.

* * *

Raven had half-expected Robin to offer some form of protest, but according to Beast Boy all he had said – and this without even looking up from the computer where he was working – all he had said was, "make sure you bring your communicators this time." 

Beast Boy already had his clipped to his belt, so they were off in a matter of moments. Cyborg took them across the bay, and from there they took a cab to the apartment building where Raven had crash-landed on the roof. When they stepped out of the cab, Raven forced herself not to look up toward the top of the building.

They took the elevator to the top floor. Beast Boy found the apartment – Raven could not remember which one it was. He stepped aside at the door and, with a little nod of his head, gestured for her to knock. She rolled her eyes, but went ahead and did it anyway.

It was not long before the door opened inward. Raven looked inside, expecting to see the half-remembered face of the woman, Joy, who had offered them help. It was not her, though.

Raven's heart leapt into her throat. Numbly, unconsciously, she took a step back, and collided lightly with Beast Boy, standing stock still behind her.

In the doorway was the thief from the museum.

But in a moment he had shifted, scratched his head sleepily, and become another person altogether – he was older than the thief was, taller and with more mass to his figure. He was dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, and he wore a pair of wireless glasses, which he adjusted as he squinted to get a better look at them.

Yet Raven had not imagined the resemblance – she shared a glance with Beast Boy, and knew that he had seen it too. It felt as if a deep pit had opened up to swallow her, deeper and deeper into darkness, and all she wanted was for everything to stop moving, to stay still, untangled and untwisted, no more, no more. No more complications, please, let there be no more.

But, oh God, wishing never got her anywhere.

The stranger in the doorway blinked and pulled back in surprise. "Joy told me, but I didn't really – You're the Teen Titans, aren't you?"

Raven stared hard at him.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Well, I – I'm David. Joy is my wife." Belatedly he held out a hand. Neither Raven, nor Beast Boy moved to take it. "Um, why don't you come in, then? I'll go get Joy." With that, he disappeared into the apartment, leaving the door wide open for them.

Raven was rooted to the spot, her legs had lost all feeling, but after a moment, Beast Boy took her by the elbow and began to lead her in.

"What are you doing?" she hissed.

"We won't find out anything by standing out here all day," he said.

Raven stared at him. What if she didn't want to find out anything…?

"Come on," he tugged her sleeve again, and this time she followed. "They seem harmless, right?"

They found Joy and David in the kitchen, speaking in low voices. When she saw them, Joy looked up and smiled. She was dressed plainly in loose jeans and an oversized t-shirt. Her short brown hair was pulled back in a tiny queue.

"Hello again," she said. "It looks like you've caught us on laundry day, so forgive the sloppy appearances. If I knew you were coming, I… Well, it's nice to see you again, anyway. I hope you're feeling better than last time…"

"Yeah, we both are, thanks to you," said Beast Boy, when Raven didn't answer.

"It was the least I could do – this is my husband, David, by the way." Joy gestured to David, who raised a hand in greeting. "He actually just got home yesterday from a long trip, so he might be a bit jetlagged…"

"I'm alright," said David, turning to Raven and Beast Boy. "You kids want anything to drink? We have sodas in the fridge."

"Oh, yes – I forgot – have a seat." Joy nodded at the stools by the island.

"We can't stay very long," said Raven, at the same time as Beast Boy answered, "Sure, that'd be great."

They stared at each other. Raven fought the instinct to bolt from the room, run away and bury her head in the sand.

"Anyway," Beast Boy went on, "we brought back the clothes you gave us – here, they're springtime fresh." He set them on the counter.

Joy smiled. "Well, thank you very much. I admit, I hadn't really expected to see them again."

"Hey," said David, frowning. "Those are _my_ clothes…"

Joy swatted him playfully on the arm, and it looked to Raven like such a practiced movement, a skill worn to perfection from the long years, like a thing the woman could do in her sleep. Raven looked about the happy little kitchen, cluttered with knick-knacks. Such a normal home for a normal couple, whose lives must have been more or less the same from day to day, a road with no pitfalls or sudden stops.

"Do you have any children?" Raven asked.

Joy and David exchanged a glance in surprise at the sudden question.

"No, we don't have any…" said Joy slowly.

"Didn't want 'em," David joked.

"Oh." Relief coursed hotly through her. She could have melted. Was it all a bizarre coincidence, then? No, she thought, and the relief faded. No, it couldn't be.

"…Are you sure?" asked Beast Boy, after a long moment.

Raven could have smacked him.

"What is this all about?" Joy asked, frowning.

Raven looked at David. The resemblance was less glaring in the light of the kitchen, but still very obvious.

"You look like somebody we've met," she said.

"_I_ do?" David echoed, raising his brows. "Who?"

"Some kid," Beast boy answered, leaning casually against the counter. "About yea high, little older than us, dark hair, skinny. Didn't catch his name…"

"Well, I don't know," said David dubiously. For that moment, Raven believed this lead would go no further. "I've been told I look just like one of my nephews, but…"

Her heart sank.

"Here." Joy crossed the small amount of floor space to the shelves behind Raven and Beast Boy. She picked up a framed picture and handed it to them.

Raven looked down at the picture. It was a formal school photo, with a blue backdrop, and the boy – the nephew of Joy and David – stiff in his suit and smile. He looked so ordinary. God, he could have been anybody.

The photo had been sitting innocuously there on the shelf the entire time. What would have happened if they had noticed it before?

"That's him," said Beast Boy gravely. A little jolt of surprise at that. She hadn't known he could be grave.

"Is he… is he in some kind of trouble?" asked Joy.

For a moment, Raven was sick with herself for bringing the dirt into their clean, uncomplicated lives.

"No," she answered. "He's just fine."

Raven didn't know if they believed her.

After that she let Beast Boy do all the talking, the finding-out of where to go and how to get there. She drifted from scene to scene in her mind, thoughts swimming hazily on by, like a stranger in a strange house, moving through the unfamiliar rooms. Floating. Voices seemed to come to her as if from a long distance.

Listening, she found out that the thief attended the university just outside the city. He was a sophomore. He lived in the dorm. He was majoring in biochemistry. His parents wanted him to be a doctor. His name was Nathan.

Thereal questions – Who was he? Why had he stolen the gem? What sorts of things did he think about? What was he like? – those remained unanswered.

Raven did not think she wanted to know – she wanted to go back to the time before all this had happened. She wanted to erase it all, wipe it away, like a pencil smudge. Each step she took now seemed to lead her further and further from that, those simple days of fighting villains because it was right, those days of feeling little and the desperate wanting to feel even less. Events had swallowed her, and now were carrying her along in their current. She did not want to go forward, and she could not go back.

She had an ominous feeling of being pulled in by invisible strings.

"What should we do?" asked Beast Boy, when they were standing outside the apartment building again.

"…We have to go," said Raven, hardly knowing why.

"Shouldn't we – you know – call the others?"

"No." She shook her head. "I – I don't care about arresting him anymore. I don't even think I want to. But… I have to go. Please, don't stop me."

The confrontation felt urgent and inevitable in her mind. Now, she thought. It must be now.

"Didn't I already tell you?" said Beast Boy. She looked up and he was smiling. "I'll do anything you want to do."

Raven didn't say it, but at that moment she knew she did not deserve him. She did not deserve any of them.

"And besides, what kind of protector would I be if I let you go off by yourself on a dangerous journey? That's right – not a very good one," he said, when Raven didn't answer.

"I thought you already were not a very good one."

"I get an A for effort, though, right?"

"Sure you do." Raven turned her gaze deliberately away down the street. "Now, how do we get there?"

Twenty minutes later found them both on the subway. Raven sat leaning into the back of her seat. Beside her, Beast Boy was fidgeting. One of his feet bounced up and down on the floor. Raven hardly noticed.

She looked out the window. The tunnel wall was rushing on by, the lights filtering in and out and in again as they passed, the wheels groaning over the tracks. There weren't many people in the car – a man in a shirt and tie fast asleep in the corner, a mother with a child that stole frequent glances at them, a young man in a sweatshirt looking moodily out the window. Good. No trouble, then.

Raven tuned out her surroundings. She thought about the thief. She thought about the Titans and her powers. Inside she was tense and brittle as glass. Soon she would shatter her pieces across the world. What then?

She didn't know what she was doing anymore.

Oddly, it didn't seem to matter. She felt the pull of a single destination, carrying her forward in the current, everything rushing, rushing on by. Time passing, time standing still, it was all the same.

The others could have handled it, she supposed. There was no need for her to go. There was only the sharpness of the feeling that she ought to. She had the sense that finding the jewel was only the edge of a deep precipice. She had no choice but to go down into it, an explorer of the dark, deep places.

So many questions – Why had she ended up on Joy and David's roof that day? Had it been deliberate? Joy and David seemed harmless, as Beast Boy had said, but she would be stupid to trust them entirely.

It occurred to Raven that she could be walking into a trap right now, but there was no urgency to that observation. I give up, she thought, I give up.

That possibility might have occurred to Beast Boy as well, because he looked jittery, but he didn't say anything.

A trap. Raven though about that harder. How would anyone have known she was coming? She hadn't even known herself until that morning. Either way, she had taken the bait. She had no more control now than the train on the track.

No control. That was a feeling she was familiar with from the long years bearing the weight of Trigon's prophecy alone, knowing her fate as intimately as a lover, knowing without question what was to come. In some ways, a relief.

She listened to the sound of the wheels grinding the track, and it seemed to rise up in her ears so that Beast Boy had to call her name three times to get her attention.

"This is our stop," he said, when she finally turned to look at him. Raven glanced around, saw that the train had stopped moving, and the car was empty. "You know… it's okay to change you're mind, if you want – I-I'll follow you, either way…"

She looked at him. He was wearing his uniform, in case he needed to transform. His hands were moving restlessly, plucking at his gloves.

"I don't want to change my mind," she said slowly.

Beast Boy nodded. "Okay."

He held out his hand for her, and, after a moment of hesitation, Raven took it. The gloveskin was rough and warm. Beast Boy pulled her to her feet, gave her hand a final squeeze before letting go. She felt a flutter of comfort which cast about like a moth and then faded to stillness.

They stepped off the train, walked without much hurry out of the subway station and onto the streets. The college was only two blocks away.

"I don't know what's going to happen…" said Raven, trying in her oblique and cowardly way to apologize. For all she knew, they were heading into danger on her whim alone.

"Well, neither does anybody else," Beast Boy shrugged. He smiled at her, and she looked away.

They walked to the school grounds. Beast Boy had used his communicator, which doubled as a database, to find out the exact room they were looking for. The buildings were plain-faced and unimpressive. Raven could hardly tell one from the next. If she had been born on earth, the daughter of a normal mother and father, she would have been looking at colleges now, comparing and deciding. She thought about that as they walked across the campus.

After an endless while, they found the right building, and went inside.

Beast Boy led her to the right door. It looked just like all the others. She wondered what she would have done without him. Again, Beast Boy gestured for her to knock. She reached out to do it, hesitated.

"What if he isn't there?" she said, as the thought occurred to her suddenly.

"Then we'll wait," Beast Boy replied, not missing a beat. "What are you afraid of, Raven?"

"Nothing," she answered automatically. She knocked on the door.

For a moment there was no answer, only a muffled shuffling from within. Then the door swung abruptly inward, and Raven felt dizzy. This time it really was the thief.

As soon as he saw them he tried to backpedal into the room, but Beast Boy quickly stepped past Raven, who had frozen in place, and stuck his foot in the door before the thief – Nathan – could slam and lock it.

"Hey," said Beast Boy, pressing on the door to force it open, with the thief pushing it shut on the other side. There was no contest. Beast Boy was very obviously the stronger of the two. "We just want to talk to you."

"Like I'm gonna believe that," said the thief, but he couldn't hold the door any longer and backed into the room as Beast Boy stumbled inside. Raven followed numbly behind.

The room was cramped and disheveled. There were two beds. Around one, clothing and garbage from old meals carpeted the floor. The thief dropped onto the other bed, sitting bonelessly on the edge. The air smelled stale.

There was nothing but silence.

"Aren't you going to ask how we found you?" said Beast Boy, after what seemed an endless while.

"I... I always figured that it was just a matter of time," the thief answered, somewhat hopelessly. "What does it matter how you did it...?"

"Then, that day you came to the tower..."

"Oh. That. I guess... it was a safe place to leave her. I went there, without really thinking about it. I should have known... Well. Sorry about the mess. My roommate…" the thief began, gesturing expansively to the messier side of the room. He stopped and frowned.

"What about your roommate?" Beast Boy asked, almost conversationally.

"Nothing. He's… an idiot." The thief – Nathan, Raven reminded herself – raked a hand through his dark hair. He sighed. "God, this is surreal…"

Raven did not know what to do. He really was just a kid, older than she was, but certainly younger in experience. What could she do?

"So you really didn'tthink that we would never find you?" said Beast Boy.

Nathan had his hands on the knees of his jeans, frowning pensively at his feet. He was wearing only socks. His t-shirt was wrinkled.

"No. I don't know _what_ I thought." He shook his head. "It's hard to believe that…"

"What?" Beast Boy pressed. Raven just watched, leaning against the wall. She wished she was wearing her cloak, but all she had on was her long-sleeved shirt and the slim black pants she had worn that day in the city with Beast Boy. Now that she was here, she found that she could not make herself speak.

"… I don't know," Nathan answered. His voice was heavy. "I don't know what's going on anymore."

Raven knew what that was like.

"Why did you do it?" she said, finally, stepping away from the wall.

He looked up and stared at her. For a long time, he said nothing. Then…

"I'm sorry. You have to know I didn't mean for that to happen – I didn't know that it would happen…"

"_Why did you do it_?" she repeated. Her fist clenched at her side. Beast Boy shot a nervous glance at her. She could do nothing to reassure him.

"It was supposed to – I don't know – to transform me." Again, the thief ran a hand through his hair. "It was supposed to make me different, I guess. Like you. I wanted to get away from this… this _ordinary_, boring life that was picked out for me, you know? I didn't want to be just ordinary anymore, but…"

Raven's eyes went wide. She breathed in, out, one at a time.

"You wanted… to be like us…?" she said slowly.

The thief – Nathan, she told herself firmly, _Nathan_, but the name wouldn't stick – he laughed at that, somewhat darkly.

"Everybody does. You knew that, didn't you?"

"…No," said Raven, honestly. But people want what they can't have, she supposed. She might have liked an ordinary life, and Nathan wanted out of his. If he knew what it was really like… She shook her head.

"Did you build that aircraft you were using yourself?" asked Beast Boy. His voice nearly startled her in its lightness. It seemed to have startled Nathan, too, because he paused before nodding slowly. "If you can create something like that, you were never ordinary to begin with."

Nathan's shoulders slumped. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"The thing is, I thought I could have stood it," he said quietly. "I could have gone through school and been a doctor and everything… 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,' don't they? I'm not the type of person to cause trouble. I'm not like that. I don't know why I…" Suddenly he stopped and looked up at them. "Are you going to arrest me, then?"

Beast Boy glanced at Raven, and remained silent, leaving it up to her. She felt the weight of the decision heavily, but she knew what her answer was, had known before coming here.

"I don't think we will."

"What?" said the thief, startled. "Why?"

"…I don't know," she sighed, closing her eyes, suddenly tired, bone-tired and hollow. "What good would it do?"

"It's probably best not to question it," Beast Boy put in. Although he had said it lightheartedly, for once Raven entirely agreed.

"Then… what are you here for?" asked the thief. Nathan.

Beast Boy and Raven exchanged glances. The truth was, she realized, neither of them had a good answer. She could have laughed at the absurdity.

"I guess you could give us the jewel," said Beast Boy, after a moment. "You know, if you're not using it or anything."

The thief gave a genuine, incredulous chuckle, equal parts astonishment and relief. "O – of course. Sure."

He got up off the bed and went over to a flimsy sort of collapsible basket by the closet. As he groped around inside it for the jewel, he tossed out dirty clothing onto the floor. Eventually, he came up with the stolen item and handed it to Beast Boy.

"Dude, the hamper?" said Beast Boy, brows raised, as he accepted the thing.

"Yeah. No one ever looks in there."

Raven rolled her eyes. "Genius."

Beast Boy looked at her. "Raven, do you…?" he held out the jewel.

She had to keep herself from physically recoiling. Her thoughts scattered. What would happen if she…? She stared at the jewel, glittering innocuously in Beast Boy's hand, red, red, red, sunset on Azarath, glinting the bronze towers, still the city streets.

"I don't think I should," said Raven, breathless. "Not yet."

Beast Boy nodded and lowered his hand. He turned to the thief. "Do you have anything we could carry this in?"

Nathan looked around helplessly. He picked something up from the pile of clothing that had come out of the hamper. "Would this work?"

It was a sock.

Raven groaned.

"Yeah, that'll do." Beast Boy took it and slipped the gem inside. It made an obvious bulge in the toe of the sock, and Beast Boy carried it like a pouch. He held it up in front of him and squinted at it. "You know what I still don't get? How you found out about this thing. I mean, we couldn't find anything about it, except that it was a really big rock, and we looked _everywhere_. But obviously it's got some sort of crazy power…"

"You… you really don't know?" said the thief, surprised. Beast Boy mutely shook his head.

A knot of tension formed in Raven's stomach. Suddenly, she wanted to get out of there. Her eyes darted for the exit, but she did not move. She felt as if she were a distant observer, watching Nathan form the words to answer, filling up with dread, with the quiet desperation Nathan had spoken of a few moments ago.

"I think," he said, measuring his words, brow creased in recollection. "I think one of my professors mentioned it. It's sort of a mystic artifact – it wouldn't work for me, but I think that could be because it had already influenced Raven… although… I mean, my information could always be wrong."

He looked at Raven, studied her. She wouldn't allow herself to squirm. She had filled up to the brim, was tight and bursting, brittle as glass.

"I was told that thing," the thief nodded to the jewel, "is supposed to grant your dearestwish."

Raven felt sick.

* * *

A/N: Cue dramatic music.

Sorry for the big delay, guys! Blame FFdotnet for not letting me upload any documents. This is a pretty long one, though, so I hope that helps make up for it.

You know, I've been looking forward to these next two chapters since I began this story, but, God, this was a bitch to write because I wanted it to be so good and I put all this pressure on myself, and gah… Well, there's things I like and things I don't like. It's always like that. But I hope you all like it, although I don't know how unexpected that was /

As always, thanks for the reviews! You guys are great!


	9. ix

ix. Chapter Eight

* * *

Both Beast Boy and the thief were staring at her, but Raven hardly saw them anymore. She hardly saw anything. Her heart thudded in her chest and she knew she had to get out. Half-blindly, she backed out of the room, down the hall to the stairwell. Instead of going back the way she came, she went up. Her shoulder crashed against the wall as she turned the corner, and she paid it no mind. 

Up and out, she thought, up and out, like a mantra.

That had always been the way. Up off the roofs of the bronze towers, up where there were no limits.

Raven burst out the door and onto the roof. The cool evening air enveloped her. She breathed in deeply and looked around, at eyelevel now with the treetops. Jump City was a glow in the distance.

She walked to the edge and there she sank to her knees, not by choice. Looking over the edge, it was a dizzying drop to the ground. Memories came to her, one after another, relentless.

By herself, peaking at the other children as they walked in line to a school she would never attend, alone and watching the traffic of people from her window in the room that the monks had given her, filled with yearning, stuffed with it up to her eyeballs, sweating it from all her pores, breathing it, eating and sleeping it, heart pumping it cyclically through her veins. She thought she would die from wanting, so she taught herself not to want at all.

Some things, Arella had told her, are just not meant to be.

Even though she had crushed and crumpled that wanting, buried it in the deep dark and forgotten it, it had flourished there like a jungle vine.

"Raven…?"

Beast Boy's voice traveled out to her, sounding a little winded. Raven could not remember running up the stairs, but she supposed that she must have done. He took a cautious step closer. She did not have the energy to turn around.

"Are you okay…?"

She remembered another time on another roof, Beast Boy extending his help and she rebuffing, rejecting without thought. She could not do that anymore. She did not have the heart.

"Is it… is it true?" Beast Boy's feet crunched the gravelly surface of the rooftop, coming slowly toward her. He stopped a few feet away. "Did you wish for...?"

"_No!_" Her hands fisted the knees of her pants. She squeezed her eyes shut tight. "I would never –"

She broke off. The words would not come.

"Then, maybe whoever is after you…" suggested Beast Boy, slowly and gently, like a man to a frightened animal. Her stomach tightened into knots, and she did not believe that she could move if she tried. She was paralyzed with shame, sick with it. What had she done to herself? Why couldn't she handle the life that had been given to her, and why was she _always running away?_

Raven shook her head, and the mouse-brown hair swayed from side to side.

"No," she said. It seemed all she could say. "No."

She thought of that first day, when she had jumped from the window in pursuit of the thief. Going after her powers had been just a convenient excuse, when the truth was she had hardly thought of them at all, except as a means to an end – she had not risked her life for her powers, not really. All of it had been for the need to stay in the tower, to be useful to her friends, to keep them close, to keep from being alone again.

The loneliness of childhood was a wound that had not healed.

And as a child, her heart's wish, every moment of every day, had been to be perfectly ordinary. And as an adult, she knew that such a wish would only deconstruct the life she had made for herself, a good life, simple and comfortable and fairly constant. She did not want change, did not want thought beyond the Titans, did not want complications, did not want it…

If only she had been able to make herself stop wanting to begin with, but she never had. She just wasn't able to.

"… Raven…? Could you maybe talk to me a little?"

Honestly, Raven was not sure that she could. She opened her mouth, no sound came out.

"Do you know what happened with the jewel?"

"I – I think I do," she said finally. Somehow, when she had fed her power into that gem, it had searched her through, and uncovered that buried wanting in the deep dark, a thing she would never have consciously wished for, unavoidably there just the same.

"Would you tell me…?" asked Beast Boy.

Slowly, seeming to move against a great resistance, Raven turned her head to look over her shoulder at him. She knew that she did not deserve the kind of caring that she saw in him, in the tense lines of his body, ready to take her and swallow her up.

Her vision blurred and she turned away again to rub her eyes. Her fingers came away wet, and she stared at them in surprise, thinking, What is this?

"I just want to help you," he said, with heartbreaking earnestness.

"…I know you do," she murmured, around a difficult tightness in her throat.

Beast Boy sighed heavily.

"Raven, come here," he said.

She focused her gaze on the edge of the roof in front if her. "Don't worry; I'm not going to jump off this time."

"That's not it," he told her. "Please. Come here."

"Why?"

"…Isn't it obvious?" There was a note of desperation in his voice that she could not figure out.

"No." She felt that she could only be a disappointment now, even in this. "Not to me."

In the silence, the sound of Beast Boy's feet shuffling seemed loud.

"I just want to be close to you, Raven," he blurted. "So could you… could you please come here?"

Her heart beat frantically. She thought about being young, her mother's body before the funeral pyre was lit, embracing for the first time the doctrine that was forced on her, to feel as little as possible, to feel nothing if she could. At that moment she had never wanted to feel anything again. She thought about the ghostly figure in the hand-mirror in her room. She thought about yearning, and Some things are just not meant to be.

Raven bowed her head, stared hollowly at her lap.

"Help me up," she said quietly to Beast Boy.

Without speaking, incredibly, he drew her to her feet and away from the edge of the roof. His hands enfolding hers were reassuringly solid and it seemed that they stood there for a long time before he let go.

"Thanks," said Raven.

"No problem."

They were silent. She looked down at his shoes.

"I didn't –" she began, rubbing a hand up and down her arm self-consciously "– I mean, I don't want to leave the tower. I never wanted to. You know that, don't you?"

"No one ever said anything about you leaving," said Beast Boy slowly, frowning.

"Don't try to tell me that none of you have thought about it," she countered, without much rancor, without much of anything.

"Why would we? We have the jewel – we can get your powers back now –" He stopped, realizing suddenly what she was trying to say to him without words. Raven peaked upward and briefly met his eyes. There was a flash of understanding. She cut her gaze back to the ground, ashamed at the knowledge that had passed between them.

"Raven," he said, urgently, "does that mean you… really did wish for this?"

"I didn't _mean _to –" It was a sad excuse, and she could not complete it.

"But why?"

"I don't know," she answered weakly. She looked away, at the surrounding trees and stars because she could not bear to look at him. Her mind reeled. She could not think straight. Raven felt a lump form in her throat, felt the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, felt it faster and faster. She could think of nothing that would not lead him to be disappointed in her.

"When I was young," she continued finally, in a low voice, "I wanted to be ordinary more than anything. I wanted it so badly sometimes I couldn't breathe – I couldn't think of anything else. And that… isn't something that just goes away…"

"Believe it or not," said Beast Boy, gesturing to his face, in his uniform the only part of him that made visible the green eyes, green hair, green skin, "I know how that feels."

"But it's more than that!" Raven turned her head sharply to look him in the eye. "I'm not like you, and – that's not easy for me, alright? It never has been! I was told to feel nothing, I wanted to feel nothing, but I've tried so hard to sever myself, to cut, cut, cut away – to stay in control _all _the_ time_ – and it's too big for me. It's _too much_, and it's not going to get any easier. I hate it. I _hate_ my powers, Beast Boy. Some days I feel like –"

Raven broke off there, startled by her own admission.

"I feel like I'm losing my mind," she finished in a small, frightened voice.

Beast Boy swallowed thickly. She could see the movement of the tiny muscles in his throat and jaw shifting beneath the skin.

"The only thing I can do," he said at last, his hands floating up as gently as gossamer to clasp her shoulders, "is tell you that you're not alone here. We… _I_ won't ever leave you, okay? Even if we only met because of your powers, that's not the reason we're still with you. That isn't why we fought for you, or why we'll always stick by you. It's got nothing to do with your powers, Rae. It's just _you_. And if you don't want them back… well, that's your choice to make. We're all with you… I – I'm with you."

Suddenly, Raven could not stand on her own and did not want to. She made a choice, and allowed herself to fall into Beast Boy's grasp, to bury her face in the junction between neck and shoulder, to inhale deeply and shakily. Her hands brushed the bumps of his spine, shoulder blades, planes of tough muscle, curious at the landscape of a body that was not her own. There was a feeling of oneness, breathing life into forgotten and neglected nerves. She felt the heady sensation of blood-rush, the prickling of pleasure as her skin seemed to welcome his touch.

Raven had always found that physical distance enahnced emotional distance and used it to her advantage. Touch was such a foreign thing to her. She had not realized how she had been starving for it until this moment. It was as sweet as the first lungful of air is to a diver breaking the surface. She was like an animal. She thought of dogs with their heads thrown back, the slow closing of a cat's eyes before the purr, knowing and abandoning themselves to the simple pleasure of physical touch.

Now she felt a welling up of love, a burst of intense affection, a wave washing over and taking her where she could not resist, leaving her weak with a feeling of hazy physical pleasure and love, nothing but love. This was why. This was why she could not… could not ever…

He touched her hair, and she wept.

"I don't want them back," she sobbed, surrendering. "_I don't want them_."

She had not cried since she was a child. It was a quiet, desperate act. There was only the violent trembling of her shoulders and the ragged pull of breath. Her eyes screwed shut, she hid her face further, her nose pressing uncomfortably into Beast Boy's collar bone.

"What can I do?" she whispered.

"It's okay," he said. She could not be sure, but she thought she felt him press a kiss in to her hair. "It's okay, it's okay."

When she had calmed down again, Raven stayed where she was, her forehead resting on Beast Boy's shoulder, her body close within the loose circle of his arms. She opened her eyes, and all she could see of his uniform was blackness. She felt that she could not move, not if the floor fell out beneath her. Her body was languid and empty, asleep.

"Here," said Beast Boy, breaking the silence before it became awkward. Raven was grateful for that. "Lie down."

He let go of her and lied on his back. She stared at him in dumb surprise and some bemusement.

"Come on," he urged, patting the space on the rooftop next to him.

Raven was too tired to argue. She obeyed.

"What are we doing?" she asked, when they were both situated side by side, faces directed up to the black stretch of sky.

"You can see the stars pretty well from here – I mean, it's nothing compared to – well, it's better than in the city, anyway." Raven turned her head to look at his profile in the gray moonlight. Beast Boy did not seem to notice. She saw him breathe in deeply, calmly.

"My parents used to do this for me," he said, looking at the sky as if he were searching for something. "I would get scared sometimes… we camped out in the wildlands a lot, and at night sometimes we would hear the big cats hunting. The sounds the dying animals made would give me nightmares… so to calm me down, my parents used to take me outside and lie down like this and tell me about the stars. It always worked to relax me…"

"You lived... in the wild?" said Raven, a spark of interest stirring inside her. Beast Boy never talked about his past. Really, none of the Titans did. She recognized that he was venturing into the intensely personal for her, and felt honored.

"Yeah," Beast Boy answered, smiling vaguely at the memory. "I was born in Africa. We lived there until…" he paused and she sensed a shifting of course. "…until I was about nine. My mom and dad were both geneticists. They got paid to study the animals there. In Africa, away from the city, the stars are so clear at night that it's like you could reach out and touch one if you wanted."

As he spoke of that place, his voice became as loving as a caress.

"I didn't know," Raven said.

He turned and smiled carelessly at her. "You never asked."

"Which is the north star?" she said, to distract herself from the funny sort of fluttering of her heart.

"I'll show you," he answered, and did so. She found that he was surprisingly knowledgeable about the subject. He told her about constellations, and how travelers used the stars to guide them. For a while, Raven forgot where she was. The sound of his voice seemed to carry her gently from thought. It was clear that the knowledge was precious to him, that these were memories that had been revisited again and again.

"Did it work?" asked Beast Boy, when he seemed to have come to the end. "Do you feel better?"

"Surprisingly… yes."

He grinned. "I knew you would." If she thought deeply on it, Raven knew she would find that nothing had changed through all this. But she was content not to think of it, to let it be for the moment. There was, after all, nothing she could do but make a choice.

"What I wanted – it wasn't about you, you know, any of you," she said, speaking of her ill-fated wish.

She felt the hard and gritty surface of the roof pressing into her through her clothing, but the sky was all she could see. There was a need, she felt, to expel the heavy things within her, to give them form and let them free. She very carefully did not think of what she would say. She tried not to think at all, just to speak, as if the words might be clearer somehow, as if her meaning might be clearer.

"It was a stupid thing to want. I always felt like I shouldn't have wanted it, but I… couldn't help it. I tried not to want anything. I didn't know that it was impossible.

"When I was five I was too dangerous to live with my mother anymore, so she sent me away. I lived with the monks on Azarath. They didn't really know what to with a child… especially one like me. I was by myself all the time, except during training. I wasn't allowed out of the compound without permission.

"I never knew when my mother would visit. Every time I wondered if it would be the last. I knew these were things that the other children didn't have to think about.

"I wanted to be like everybody else so _badly_. I thought it would be easier, but it's not. I wasn't meant to be like this.

"I guess I… knew that.

"I just didn't want to admit it to myself."

Somebody sighed, but Raven could not tell whether it had been her or Beast Boy.

"Another thing my parents would tell me, after – after this happened," Beast Boy said, gesturing down the length of his body, "was that we're all about ninety-nine point nine percent the same genetically anyway, so I couldn't have been all that different from everybody else. Maybe like a point zero one percent, or a point zero zero one. Not too far off, right?"

"That's not really…"

"I know. It didn't work on me, either. I mean – they tried, but… well, I never said they were perfect, did I?"

Raven stared up at the sky, a tiny crease forming between her brows. Somehow, that last statement more than any other drove home the intimacy of the moment. She had a flash of panic at the sense of closeness, wanting to call back all the words, wind them back like a ball of yarn, like a video tape. She had said too much, she had let spill too much, and time before had told her that this was a dangerous thing.

"It's getting cold," she said, abruptly, but she did not move. "We should go."

"Raven, I –" Beast Boy turned his head to look at her. "Whether you have your powers or not… I'll protect you."

The sharp sense of panic grew bleary.

"…okay," she whispered.

* * *

The walk back to the subway station was mostly quiet. Raven was exhausted. Her body was like a weight to be carried. Her eyelids were heavy, her arms and dangling hands were heavy, her feet were heaviest of all. She moved mechanically, and once they were seated on the train, she could not remember how she had gotten there. 

Beast Boy spoke sometimes, but more for his own sake than hers – half the time she hardly heard him, and she had no energy to reply. But she felt no need for words. There they were, seated side by side, and after everything that had happened, that had to be enough. She could say no more. There was nothing left.

Her mind was strangely blank. She could not allow herself to think. It had come down to the point where only her action could move things forward. The choice had been left entirely up to her. It was like placing a novel in the hands of a young child. She could turn it over, chew on it, flip the pages, but she could not open it and comprehend what was inside, or put it to proper use. Raven did not know what to do with it. She had rarely been in the position to direct the course of her own life so strongly.

To take back her powers, to crawl back into the cocoon that she had broken from. To remain as she was, to start new again, alive and alone.

What could she do? _What could she do?_

She wished that somebody would tell her.

The train lurched into motion, and Raven leaned back against the seat. The rocking of the car, the monotonous ticking of the wheels against the tracks were vague, soothing sensations. She closed her eyes, only for a moment, and when she opened them again –

"Raven?"

– she was raising her head from Beast Boy's shoulder, blinking blearily at him, scattering half-dreamt shadows to the corners of her mind.

"I… fell asleep?" Raven murmured, surprised.

"Uh, yeah… you… I mean… Yeah." Beast Boy, staring at her strangely, seemed to have lost his capacity for speech. She accepted that without much thought.

"How long?" she asked, blinking in the harsh fluorescent light.

"N-not very… I'd say twenty minutes, at a guess… Don't you remember?"

Raven looked at him.

"…remember what?"

Beast Boy seemed to shrink away from her, a tiny bit, watching his twiddling fingers with pronounced interest. "Well, um… I mean, you… you… you were…"

"What?" she asked, losing patience. She was sure she had embarrassed herself in some way, and wanted him to spit it out and get it over with, quick like a band-aid. "Did I drool on you, or something?"

He laughed weakly at that. "No, but that's a good one…"

Raven was surprised at herself. She had not thought there was any room left in her for irritation, but there it was. She frowned.

"Beast Boy, tell me what it is. _Now_."

He gulped.

"Did you know that you talk in your sleep?" he blurted.

"_What?_"

The car went dark.

Raven looked about in panic. The sound of the train on the tracks seemed to swell and press in upon her. Her heart hammered in her chest. She could not see. She could not see at all.

Close by her face, close all around her, she felt the flutter, the beating of wings, the brush of feathers. There was no room for movement, no room for breathing, for sound, pressing in upon her, in the dark, she was like a child hiding in the dark of the cedar trunk as she had been told, afraid and hiding, crouched with the damp smell of the wood.

When she reached out reflexively for her powers, there was nothing, but she sensed, as one senses eyes on their back, that the darkness was not ordinary and that she was not alone.

She made a blind grab for Beast Boy's arm, and somehow she found his fingers. There was a moment where, gripping his hands, she felt no harm would come to her.

Her body was enveloped suddenly with a rigid cold, and she was ripped away from that, jerked backwards into the dark.

"Beast Boy!"

"_Raven!_"

The last syllable of her name became a dangerous growl. An immense shadow sailed over her. She heard a clatter of claws on the floor, the wet sound of ripping, a shocked grunt of pain.

The cold that had gripped her withdrew. Raven breathed in deeply in relief. The sounds of fighting went on, but when she turned her head in that direction, she could not see a thing. Only a few moments passed. It felt like forever.

Frozen on the ground and watching the dark, Raven did not see Beast Boy's tossed-aside body coming towards her until it was too late. He crashed into her, and they both skidded to the back of the train. His body was hot with the fight, and covered in fur. Raven lied there, shocked and bruised, but he was up in an instant, standing protectively over her. She felt his deep bass growl vibrating in her chest.

She recognized dimly that he had not transformed into any sort animal, but into the beast of his fight with Adonis.

Raven craned her neck to look where he was looking, but it was useless. She listened to Beast Boy's breath coming in short, winded huffs from the great lungs. They sat still in the dark. Her eyes were wide and searching. Her heart beat wildly.

Suddenly, Beast Boy lunged forward. Raven saw a flash of white light. Then she saw no more.

* * *

A/N: The epic conversation of Raven and Beast Boy. So, so shmoopy... 

I want to talk a little bit about **music**. **Feel free to skip over **this if you don't want to hear my little thoughts. Okay, onward: Difficult as this chapter was to write, I got to listen to my favorite kind of music - sad songs! Music is a must for me when I'm writing. And,oh, God, do I love sad music... Cat Power is one of my absolute favorite artists, and throughout this whole fic, I've been listening to her stuff - especially the songs 'Maybe Not' and 'Colors and the Kids'(I think of this song as 'the raven song' XD)and 'The Greatest.' If you've never heard her music, I highly recommend it. I think her best album is probably You Are Free... Also, Iron and Wine is a great band for mellow music. Love the songs 'Jezebel' and 'Cinder and Smoke' and 'Gray Lady.' The soundtrack to 'The Piano' got replayed a whole lot, too...

I guess that's it. These are just songs that got the mood going for me. I just wanted to share :P

I got such wonderful reviews from you all last chapter! I can't give enough thanks to those of you who review! I really enjoyed reading them, but I want to throw something different out this time - as an author, I'd like to know what works and what doesn't, so...did anyone have a favorite line or scene? Something that jumped out at them, maybe?Or even something they really didn't like?

No pressure on that. Just wondering. Obviously, you don't have to do it... but if you happen to think of something, I would love to hear from you :D

Thanks for reading!


	10. x

x. Chapter Nine

* * *

Raven was dreaming. 

She was five years old. Her mother knelt in front of her, and she wanted to squirm beneath the weight of Arella's cool hands on her shoulders, but she made herself keep deathly still and quiet. She made a game of it. Don't move, don't move, she told herself, don't breathe, don't move.

"Do you understand what I am telling you?" said mother. Raven looked up at her with wide eyes, trying not to blink. Mother was beautiful and solemn, and Raven told herself that if she was solemn like mother was, then maybe she would be beautiful too.

"Yes," Raven answered, obediently. "I won't see you anymore."

She saw immediately that she had made a mistake by the flash of hurt in her mother's eyes. She wanted to call back the words, open her mouth and eat them back up.

Mother shook her head. "I will come to you. Don't worry. You have to live in a different house now, with different teachers, but… you are still my daughter. I will come to you, when I can."

"I… I want to stay here." _With you,_ she nearly said, but stopped herself in time. Raven forced her gaze sullenly to the floor, trying pitifully to tamp down an embarrassing swell of emotion. Don't let Mama see, she told herself, she won't like it if she sees.

Several cracks appeared in the polished granite, each with a noise like a firecracker. Hot with shame, Raven whipped her head back up to look at her mother.

"It is not safe here, anymore," said mother, gently.

"I – I'm sorry," Raven whispered, knowing it was all her fault, everything was all her fault – leaving home, Mama's sadness, the cracks in the floor, everything. She wanted those cracks she had just made to swallow her up and make her into nothing.

But Arella just leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Raven closed her eyes. She shivered.

"I'll protect you, little bird. Do not fear."

The hazy words seemed to come from far away.

She was six years old. The hand on her shoulder was large and heavy and belonging to the head of the order. He was called the elder.

"You must not focus _too_ hard," he said. His voice echoed in the empty hall. "Be gentle."

Raven narrowed her eyes in concentration. The ceramic jar rose shakily into the air. One inch, two inch, three…

"Easy, easy," he murmured, watching the progress of the jar just as carefully as she was.

For what seemed the hundredth time, the jar exploded into pieces. Raven flinched.

"Now, now, none of that," the head of the order sighed, patting her on the back. "It's alright. Perhaps we should begin to use pebbles instead…"

As her eyes burned with tears of frustration, the ceramic shards were ground into dust.

She was seven years old. The wall around the compound seemed high as anything, and smooth with no ledges or footholds. When the gates were closed, there was no way out. The monks did not mind this, but Raven did.

She was not allowed out of the compound, except on rare occasions, and sometimes when her mother came to visit. Each day, the grounds seemed to grow smaller and smaller. Sometimes she could not remember what the city looked like, what other people looked like. Today, she was curious.

There was nobody around. This was not unusual. When training was over for the day, the monks moved on to other diversions. Some were in the meditation rooms, others at prophecy, still others conducting research in the archives or tending the gardens. Raven was accustomed to being left alone. She understood that the she was lucky the monks had been willing to take her in and train her, that they were unused to the burden of children and she must abide by their rules.

She looked at the wall, towering above her, stretching toward the sky. The gates were closed, as always, and there was no way out but to go up. There was no leverage for climbing. Her eyes touched the top of the wall, and it felt right.

I am up there, she thought, and suddenly she was.

The ground seemed to fall easily away from her. She realized that she was flying. Now she could see the city above the wall, but it had ceased to matter. Just a brief flicker of thought would take her where she wished. She made a clumsy circle of the compound. She brushed the tops of the cloister towers with her fingers.

Raven had never experienced freedom so complete.

She laughed. Her landing was exceptionally clumsy, and she skinned her knees and bruised her hands. The monks scolded and scolded her, sent her to bed without dinner, but she was happy. She had done something that nobody could touch.

"It is not safe," said the head of the order, just as mother had said.

She was eight years old. Raven did not know what was happening, but the usually sedate monks were frantic. The air was heavy with magic. It tickled her skin. She tried to stay out of the way, but the elder finally found her, took her hand and led her away. She stumbled as she tried to keep up. She did not ask what was happening.

The elder led her quickly and silently to the archives. He brought her to the back of the long hall. Her eyes widened. The great chest was open, its contents, the old and precious scrolls that had been written before Azar, were nowhere to be seen. Raven was afraid, but she tried to hide it.

"Get in," said the elder. "Quickly. Be as silent as you can. I will come to get you, later, when it is safe again."

She swallowed thickly. There was nothing she could do. She climbed obediently into the cedar chest. Her heart was thundering, beating a mile a minute. She thought for sure that the elder would hear it, but he seemed not to. When she was settled he closed the lid and it was dark.

This chest was where precious things were hidden. The wards on it were some of the strongest in the entire compound. No one could sense her in here. She should have felt safe, but she did not.

A long time passed. There were voices, loud, angry, indistinct.

Darkness. Blank, blank, blank.

She sat that way for what could have been hours, hiding as she had been told, crouched with the damp smell of the wood.

Afterward, no one would tell her what had occurred.

She was thirteen years old. Arella was dead, and Raven did not know how or why. She was afraid to ask. She was afraid to find out that it was somehow all her fault.

Arella was pale and beautiful on the funeral pyre. They burned the body.

Raven felt as if she were the one being burned, blackened to dust.

All she could think of was her mother, sitting up with her in the night, cool hands and the sweat of nightmares, a soft voice like satin taking her through her first meditative chant, brushing her hair and feeling the cropped-off edges with her fingers, a quiet, sturdy presence, the softness of her lap, with the doves in the garden, melancholy smiles and wanting, wanting, wanting to be like her – no more, now.

She remembered Arella saying to her, _I'll protect you_, and it was a tortured thought. There was no one in the world who would say that to her now. There seemed to be no one in the world at all.

A chasm opened and swallowed her. She was glad for numbness. She slept. Waking was hard, moving and breathing was hard. The light hurt her eyes. She closed the blinds. She slept, long and dreamless, like one taking a deep pull of water in the midst of dry desert.

She wanted to sleep forever, for as long as she possibly could.

Days later – there was no knowing exactly how many – the elder came to her. She had known he would come. Part of sleeping had been waiting. She knew what he would say, too, but she allowed him to say it. Her throat was dry and rusted from disuse, and there was no hurry.

"It is not safe for you to stay here any longer," he said, as gently as he could, not as gently as her mother would have done. "Without Arella… even my influence… Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

She nodded, not able to speak.

"I'm going to send you far from here, to a new planet, somewhere you'll be safe."

She opened her mouth, feeling the familiar weight of Trigon's prophecy. "But…" was all she managed.

The elder smiled wearily. His eyes were tired and sad. "What will come, will come," he said, repeating the favorite bromide of the order. "We can only react to circumstances as they arise. We all do what we can. The rest is fate."

These words mowed over whatever small desire to protest had arisen. She did not care, and she did not want to. She stared at her boots without seeing them. The silence stretched and grew awkward and it did not matter.

"Perhaps…" the elder hesitated. "Perhaps I should not say this, or perhaps I should have said it long ago, but… despite the dangers, I wish you would allow yourself some happiness. You will have a new life now. Wherever you go, whatever you do, I want you to be happy."

Her thoughts were far away, and she hardly heard him. His voice withered and died. The scene became like a speck of light in the distance.

The space she was in was dark and empty.

"Hello?" she whispered, tentatively.

"It's time to go now," said a voice. "Time to get out."

Her heart hammered, and she did not know why.

"Go," said the voice, and she wanted to obey. The word seemed to fill her up, seeping into her bones, her skin, her teeth, like an inkstain. She took it in. She wanted it. There was no reason to resist.

_Go._

Yes, she thought, I will.

Her heart was a struggling creature, a wounded thing, pumping as furiously as the wings of a hummingbird.

What could she do? She wanted somebody to tell her…

_Go._

Raven burst into waking like a diver breaking the surface. She gulped air as one suffocating. Reality slammed into her – the thief and the gem, the attack and the beast in the dark, and now… now…

Raven looked about her, and realized she was in the infirmary in Titan Tower.

All the urgency went out of her. Her body felt loose and empty, and she slumped back into her pillow. The sheets were starchy, as usual, but they smelled clean. It was dark. The only noise came from the heart rate monitor by her bedside.

She found she could not lie still. Raven shoved aside the covers, and sat on the edge of the bed, legs dangling over the floor. She was still dressed in her slacks and shirt. They felt dirty and uncomfortable, pressed too close to her skin for too long.

She stood from the bed, ignoring the soreness in her legs, the stiffness of her muscles. She walked to the window, and drew aside the curtain. Outside, the city lights twinkled, reflected off the bay. The sun was a small glow on the horizon. It was nearly dawn.

The sight was welcoming, seeming to open its arms to her.

_Go._

Her hand reached up, without thought, to slide the window open…

"Rae…?"

Raven blinked. She looked at her hand on the window latch, and wondered why it was there.

"Wh… what are you doing? Are you okay?"

She turned around, and saw Beast Boy's eyes glittering in the dark. He had pushed aside the curtain between their beds. Suddenly, she could recall all the things she had said to him on the rooftop. He was standing some feet away from her, but still he seemed too close. Embarrassment washed queasily over her. She stared at him, frozen, unable to look away.

His hair was mussed from sleep and from the fight, but there were no bandages or braces, casts or slings. He appeared unharmed – messy, but unharmed. There was a part of her also that was just… just glad. Glad to be there and drink in the sight of him.

"I'm… fine," Raven said, after a moment, hardly believing it herself. They were both fine. "What happened? How did we get here?"

"Do you remember what happened on the train?" he asked, cautiously. She noticed he was leaning on the frame of the curtain, gripping it with one hand for support. There were deep purple smudges beneath his eyes. She felt a stab of guilt.

"Yes," she said quietly. "…Thank you."

Even in the dim light, his blush was a vivid green. "I – it was… I mean, you don't have to thank me. I wanted to do it, and – I said I would protect you, and you would have done the same for me. So, um… anyway… I – I guess I don't remember all that much, myself. I never do, when I… you know."

"I know," said Raven, thinking of the hugeness of the beast hiding in his narrow body. She hesitated, then asked, "Did you see… who it was?"

Beast Boy frowned, obviously frustrated. "No. I never got a look at him. He ran away after you blacked out, I think," he said glumly. "And… he took the jewel."

Raven felt as if she had been punched in the gut. All the breath went out of her. She closed her eyes. Maybe she hadn't known what to do, but… still…

It was out of her hands now, and she realized that however much it had scared her, she had wanted to choose.

"We'll get it back," said Beast Boy, firmly. Raven only nodded half-heartedly, unwilling to hope. He looked at her, for a long moment, as if deciding. "How are you feeling…?" he asked tentatively.

"Fine," she replied, without thinking.

He took a deep breath. "Did you sleep okay?"

Raven frowned, feeling a prick of suspicion, wanting suddenly to run from the room, to run as far and as fast as she could. He was too close. She retreated a step, and her back met the wall.

"Did you have a nightmare?" he said, as one breaking a barrier. He did not move from his place, but the way he looked at her made her feel as if he had taken some steps closer. She did not answer, and he pressed with quiet insistence, like a thumb against the pulse of the matter, "Do you always have nightmares?"

She remembered, _"did you know that you talk in your sleep?"_ and her stomach seemed to drop. She was coming undone. Everything she had tried so hard to keep wrapped up was spilling over. All such a mess.

"Dreams are useless," Raven said weakly. "I try not to remember them."

"Yeah, well, I probably would too, if I was having your kind of dreams."

"You don't know what you're talking about," she said, in a low voice. She did not want this conversation to go any further. She wanted him to stop.

Beast Boy drew himself up. "I know that it has something to do with your mother. You – you said something about her, when I went to put the clothing bags in your room that night, when you fell asleep on the train, when you were in that bed just now. And… you were… crying…"

"I was _not_," Raven snapped, not knowing what else to do.

"Look, I'm just worried about you!" Beast Boy's voice rose to match hers. "I've been thinking about it, I've been thinking about it a lot, and you have issues, Raven –" She opened her mouth angrily to argue, but he wouldn't let her "– No, let me say this. I have to say this. I don't know exactly how you feel, but I think it's a good thing that you lost your powers because you've been hiding behind them. You've probably been doing it your whole life. That's why you didn't have any clothing of your own – you think that as long as you have your powers, you can't be a full person. You're trying to be like a… a machine, just a cloak and a name, just a weapon, but you're so much more than that to all of us. Your powers aren't the only important part of you. And I don't think you really get that."

Raven closed her eyes. The words were as heavy as a physical blow. She opened her mouth. All that came out was, "I…"

"You use your powers as an excuse to act cold to everyone. You use them as a weapon to keep people away. And you always say it's for our own good, but… you're the one who's scared. Something happened to you, and now you're afraid of being hurt. It's easier just not to think about it, isn't it? But that's… not good for you."

Beast Boy slumped down onto the edge of his bed, exhausted. Raven couldn't seem to speak. She leaned against the wall, staring at the floor without seeing it. There was no way to justify what he had said. She did not know how much time passed – an instant, an hour, an eon – before she left the room without a word.

The door wheezed shut behind her. She forgot to keep walking, and stood still in front of it. She was empty of thought and feeling. It had all been laid out so neatly before her.

Eventually, Raven began to move. Her mind shifted backward, away from the most immediate subject of what Beast Boy had said, shying away from it, back toward days old dreams.

She had stopped meditating almost entirely since the loss of her powers. It felt wrong, and she hadn't wanted to think about the change. So she had let herself dream at night, but what dreams she had were elusive when morning came. They wanted to be forgotten. She was happy to forget.

The truth was… she had known they would be nightmares, and dreams about the past.

Her mother had a place in her mind already, however uncertain. There was no reason to change it by looking back. There was no reason to complicate things further. That was the last thing Raven wanted.

What she had dreamt that night, though, was different altogether. It was lucid memory, with a weight and mass of its own, a solid block in her mind. Why had that happened? As if her subconscious – she thought again of the ghostly figure in the mirror – were trying to tell her something.

She didn't think she wanted to know.

Raven bit her lip in concentration, walking aimlessly through the tower halls. It was light out now, and quiet. The others must have been asleep, she thought. She wondered what was happening here when she and Beast Boy never came back. They must have been worried, she realized guiltily, with a kind of a start. It was the first time she had thought about them since the day before.

Now she looked about the places she was passing by. She thought of Cyborg and Beast Boy, playing their ridiculous games and trying to get her to join in. She thought of Starfire, joyfully hanging up the decorations for a Tamaranian ceremony known only to her. She thought of Robin, herding them all into another training simulation with incredible single-mindedness.

How could she possibly leave this life behind?

Because if she chose to live without her powers that was surely what she would do. She could feel it happening already. It would be slow, inevitable, and unwanted.

"Raven! You have awakened!"

Raven hardly had time to look up before she was enfolded by Starfire's arms. Starfire hugged her, fiercely and thoroughly. For a moment, Raven stiffened. She heard Starfire give a wet sniffle. Haltingly, she raised her hands to rest on Starfire's back.

"Forgive me," said Starfire, pulling away to wipe her eyes. "But I have been most concerned..."

"I... I'm alright," Raven told her, hoping that whatever else happened the hugging and crying thing was over. "Don't worry."

"Come," said Starfire, seeming almost not to hear."I will lightly char a slice of bread for you."

With that, Starfire took her by the hand and led her toward the kitchen, where she made good on her word. Within moments, Raven was seated at the counter with a steaming cup of tea and a number of toast points, each one slathered, as only Starfire could slather, in raspberry jam.

"You must tell me everything that has happened," said Starfire, sitting down across from her. "What sort of evil entity did you encounter?"

"I… I don't know," Raven answered, lamely. She bit tentatively into a piece of toast. Surprisingly, it was not half bad, and she realized how long it had been since she had last eaten. "It was too dark to see."

As she dug in to the stack of toast hungrily, she allowed Starfire to prod the entire story out of her. She told her everything that had happened from the time the lights on the trainwent out to the moment she lost consciousness. She did not speak about the dream she had afterward, or the details of her conversation with the thief.

"I do not know what to make of it," said Starfire pensively, when Raven had finished. "Robin will wish to know of this."

Raven nodded absently. She was not looking forward to that conversation.

"So… did you come looking for us?" she asked after a moment, as it occurred to her that she didn't know exactly how she had returned safely to the tower.

Starfire blinked in surprise. "You mean…? Oh! Of course you do not remember. We nearly left to search for you, when Beast Boy appeared here in his most monstrous form. He collapsed very quickly after arriving. He must have carried you all the way here."

Whatever small embarrassment Raven had felt at the mention of Beast Boy had morphed solidly into guilt by the end of Starfire's explanation. It had never been more obvious to her that she did not deserve him.

"O-oh," was all she managed to say. Raven looked up at Starfire. "Would you… excuse me? I… I need to get some rest."

"I will not keep you," said Starfire kindly. "If you wish, I will inform Robin of your exploits."

"Thanks," Raven said as she stood abruptly to go, knocking her chair back with the sudden movement. The chair legs protested against the floor. "I… would like that."

Starfire smiled at her. Raven turned and left.

After that, she could not seem to get to her room fast enough. She walked at a clipped pace. The walls seemed to press in close to her. Her breath came in short, and the air was thick.

She opened the door to her room and it was like stepping from dead, dry heat into subterranean coolness. Raven sighed with relief.

First came a shower. She turned the spray up as hot as she could stand it and stood beneath it. The pounding of the jet on her back, on her neck, on her face, was beautiful. Steam rose from the water and her skin. She imagined that she was on fire, all her imperfections burning away, and underneath there was nothing left. Her skin, afterward, was pink and glowing.

She combed her hair in front of the mirror, enjoying the repetitive motion of the brush. Slow and steady, again and again until she was clean. Finally she was all untangled, and she could see the straight and perfect lines that the comb teeth had made in her stick-straight hair.

Then she moved to the closet, changed her clothing methodically, piece by piece, old clothes dropped neatly in the hamper, new ones smoothed free of creases over her body, clean and fresh-smelling.

When she was all done, Raven put on her shoes and walked out of her room. She went down the hall, being careful not to meet anybody on the way, and took the service elevator down to the ground floor. She walked out of the tower and headed out to Jump City.

She did not know where she was going, but she knew that she had to get out.

* * *

A/N: Unfortunately, there may be some delay on the next chapter. It's college orientation time for me, so I'll be away from home for a few days and not in a position to write much. Sorry, guys. Real life is a bummer :( 

Anyway, you're all fabulous. Thank you for the wonderful reviews!I would be nothing without you guys... or I'd at leastfeel like it ;)


	11. xi

xi. Chapter Ten

* * *

Hours passed before whatever impulse had driven her into Jump City wore off. When it did, Raven did not know where she was, and could not remember why she had left in the first place. She felt as if she had been sleepwalking. The time between leaving the tower and seeming to wake up in the thick of the city was almost blank. 

Raven looked about her, at the unfamiliar storefronts, unfamiliar faces and street names, cars rushing anonymously by as fast as she could blink in a gust of exhaust. Nobody had recognized her, or if anybody had, they had said nothing to her. She was a plain face in the crowd. That was one thing she had never been before.

For a moment, Raven allowed herself to enjoy it. She was nobody. She could walk into any of the doors lining the sidewalk, she could sit down at one of the restaurants, she could browse about the bookstore, and no one would remember it the next day, or even know that she had been there at all. She was like a ghost, floating, unfettered by recognition, lost in the crowd, swallowed by it, one single droplet in the sea of a thousand faces. She was free, really, to do whatever she wanted.

She looked up at the sky, gray and overcast, and she thought about flying.

It was a few more moments before Raven admitted to herself that she didn't know what she wanted to do, that she had no idea where she was going, and that she was flat out lost in a part of the city that she did not recognize. Why had she left the tower? What was she doing?

She looked at the skyscrapers towering over her, and she was so low, low to the ground. She felt as small and insignificant as a bug.

What was she _doing_?

I can't go back, thought Raven suddenly. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, surprised by the fierceness of the idea. She had nowhere to go. She had nobody to go to. There was nothing for her to do. Her breath misted in the morning chill. She could not go back.

She could not return to that slow slipping away from her friends. Best to cut the ties quick like a bandaid, like a yanked tooth. She had been on her own once, in the time before the Titans. She would find a way to do it again.

Her mind seemed to shake itself, to stir slowly and fumblingly like a body rising from long sleep.

First she would need money - no, first she would need a plan. Money could be the first part of the plan, though. Okay. First she would find a bank and withdraw from her account. How much did she have in her account? Enough. It was enough, right? It would have to be enough. Then she would need to get away, because the Titans could trace the withdrawal. Were they looking for her? Well, she could take the bus -

She remembered sitting next to Beast Boy on the bus, in borrowed clothing, holding that silly doll he had given her, staring unhappily at her knees. She was a fool.

- But she would have to take the bus. And then she would… and then…

Before, it had been just a tweak of her powers, a light brush of persuasion into the susceptible mind of the landlord, and she had had a place of her own with no papers, no guardian, and no real identification. This time she would have to do it the hard way. When she thought about it, she realized that she didn't really know what that would entail. She was resourceful, and she would find out, but for now it was too much.

Raven walked. Without knowing where or why, only that she should. She had to. Her back was stiff and her legs were sore. There was nothing else for her. She had to.

_Go._

She shook her head, to clear it.

Her hair was still damp, and the wind had filled it with fly-aways. It was cold. She was wearing linen pants and a sweater, and she wished she had dressed warmer.

Focus, Raven told herself. She began to watch for street names. As a Titan, she was required to be familiar with the geography of the city. It was not long before she had a vague sense of her location. She began to walk slowly in the direction she believed would lead to the bank. There was no hurry, because she realized that she had all the time in the world.

"Raven!"

She stopped dead in her tracks at the sound of Beast Boy's voice. Oddly, she felt no surprise. She turned around to see him pushing through the sidewalk traffic to reach her. He stopped in front of her and bent over, gasping for breath. Raven stared down at his head of pine-green hair, his lean and wiry body. She saw his ribs shift beneath his uniform with each inhalation. He raised his head, caught her staring, and straightened up.

"Jeez, Raven, we - we've all been looking for you," he said, finally, awkwardly. "What… why did you leave?"

It took a few false starts, her mouth flapping uselessly, before Raven could produce the words.

"I just needed to get out," she told him, because she had no better answer. "For a little while. To clear my mind."

"O-oh." Beast Boy seemed to lose some of his energy. His shoulders slumped.

"I'm sorry," said Raven abruptly, "for making you look for me."

He looked surprised. "What? Raven, that doesn't even matter."

She shook her head, pressing her lips together. At Beast Boy's arrival, some people had begun to stare.

"I didn't mean to worry you," she said. "But… I…"

_I have to go._ She couldn't tell him that, because he would ask where she was going, and why, and maybe even if he could follow. What could she say to that? How could she explain, when she could not explain it even to herself? He would not simply let her go.

"You know, it's… it's not safe for you to be out her alone," he sighed. "I mean, something could have happened to you. What if that thing that attacked uson the train came back?"

"It didn't," she frowned. She had not thought of that at all, before. Strangely, the danger had simply not occurred to her.

"I know, but…" Beast Boy stopped and visibly gave up the argument. "Well, anyway, are you ready to go back? I can call the others."

"No," she answered, too quickly. "I don't want you to do that."

"Can I call them to tell them you're alright…?" he asked slowly, his brow creasing in confusion.

"Please," said Raven, looking at a spot on the ground to one side of his shoe. "Just… don't."

"Why?"

"I... don't want you to."

"But…_why_?" Beast Boy asked again, looking at her searchingly.

"I can't go back," she said, willing him to understand. With everything she had, she willed him to see what she did. She wished he would see that she had to go, and leave her. At the same time, she knew that it was not in him to do that.

"What do you mean?" There was a note of exasperation in his voice. "Where else will you go, Rae? What are you doing?"

"Don't ask me that," she told him, angry because all her wishing had not worked, because it never, ever did.

"You don't even know!" he cried, correctly interpreting her answer. "Raven, you can't just wander around by yourself until you think of something."

"It's worked pretty well so far," she murmured darkly.

"There's still somebody out to get you - remember that?"

"No, I forgot," Raven snapped, suddenly furious with him.

"It's dangerous and…" he groped for a word, "and stupid!"

"Stupid?" she repeated, hating him with her eyes. "Coming from you, that doesn't mean anything."

Beast Boy returned the glare full force. A little part of her said to stop this now, and she squashed it recklessly.

"What is your problem? I've been nothing but nice to you, ever since we met, and you - you just -" He broke off, cutting his gaze to the side with a sharp turn of his head. She didn't care.

"I never asked you to be nice to me -"

"God, nobody should have to _ask_, Raven. That's just sad."

"- I never asked you to help me," she barreled blindlyforward as if he had not spoken, "because I don't want you to. I don't want you to worry about me. I don't want you to care about me. I just want you to leave me alone."

Beast Boy stared at her. His usually expressive eyes were forbiddingly blank. He shoved his hands in his pockets.

"Then what are you doing standing here, talking to me for?" he said in a cold, quiet voice that she had never heard before. She shuddered, and briefly wondered what he had done and how she could undo it. "Get out of here, if that's what you want. Go."

Raven needed no second urging. She whipped around and began to walk away quickly. Her fists were clenched tightly, her head bowed. The Tower was secondary anymore. She just wanted to get away from Beast Boy,and that cold, quiet voice. Another thing that she had ruined. Why did she have to ruin everything she touched?

"Wait! Raven!"

Raven didn't want to wait. She had to get away. She pushed through the sea of people, half-running, stumbling, barely looking at what was ahead of her. She crashed into purses, shoulders, and elbows, but she did not care. A strange kind of desperation had taken her over and was moving her forward, controlling her legs to pump faster, her heart to beat like a drum.

She knew that Beast Boy must be following her, and that he was the faster runner. She didn't dare look back. The only way to go was forward, forward, forward.

Abruptly, far faster than she had expected, she had reached the end of the block and was stepping off the curb. There was no time to stop herself. She hurtled forward, and when she looked up, she was looking into oncoming traffic.

The phrase deer in headlights had always seemed stupid and unlikely to her, but now she finally understood it.

Before she knew what was happening, arms pulled her backward and out of the way. A line of cars sped by with a blast of horn. The breeze they made as they went past tugged at her hair. Raven hardly noticed.

She leaned into a body that she knew somehow to be Beast Boy's. Her legs were weak, her arms were loose, and she was heavy and boneless. She sat down clumsily on the sidewalk, shivering. Her throat was dry. Her heart was going like a jackhammer. She thought that it might burst out of her.

She felt like such an idiot. She was the one who hated attention, but now people were staring, and she was the one who was sensible and smart, but she had been so utterly stupid. She wanted to take it back and do it over. Her entire body seemed to burn with shame, seemed to burn down to the bone.

"…Raven?"

If she'd had her powers, she might have been able to take the hit. As she was now… she did not know what would have happened. She was frightened and embarrassed of it all.

A hand touched her shoulder. She realized that Beast Boy was crouched in front of her, looking at her with concern. She wondered how long he had been there.

"Raven, are you okay?"

Raven squeezed her eyes shut tight, swallowing thickly.

"I'm fine," she said, in a strangled voice, as if it pained her.

He sighed. "You're not fine."

Not fine, she thought dazedly, not fine, not fine…

"Do you think you can get up?" asked Beast Boy gently. Raven blinked, bringing the world back into focus.

"Yes," she answered, nodding. She took his hands without thinking about it, and he pulled her to her feet.

"Good," he said. His arm went around her, to steady her as they walked a short distance to where there was a bench outside of one of the coffee shops. She was glad to drop down onto it. She leaned deep into the back of the seat.

"We don't have to go back home, if you don't want to," Beast Boy offered, after a moment.

Home, she thought absently, wonderingly.

"Is it okay if I call the others, though? Later, I mean… not now."

She nodded numbly.

"Raven…?"

"I'm sorry," she said abruptly. "I don't know why I…"

_I don't know why I'm like that. I don't know why I said those things. _Raven frowned and looked away uncomfortably.

"It doesn't matter anymore. I'm… I'm just glad - I'm glad you're alright… and, look, I'm the one who should be apologizing," said Beast Boy,diverting the blame tohimself, as he always did. "So… I'm sorry. About what I said. Before, and… in the hospital room… thing… um."

That was something she had not allowed herself to think about. Raven rubbed her eyes, suddenly very tired.

"No, you were right." Her voice was thick with emotion, but she told herself she would not cry. She sighed heavily, breathing out all the tension in her. "You were right about everything."

"A guy could get used to hearing that," Beast Boy joked, trying to defuse the moment. One corner of her mouth went up, against her will.

"I think it's a one time thing," she told him.

"Rats."

"Yeah." Raven stared at the ground. "I have… a lot to think about."

The jewel, the attacker, her powers and the Titans, and life without them both. How could she even begin? It was all too tangled together, a jungle with no light squeezing through the claustrophobic trees, hot and dark and no way out. There were too many things she did not know.

"Forget that, Raven,"said Beast Boy simply, breaking her from thought."I just want you to be happy. That's all."

She turned to look at him, surprised, thinking of what the elder had said to her on Azarath, years ago after Arella's death.

'…_despite the dangers, I wish you would allow yourself some happiness…'_

For a moment, she was utterly, absurdly grateful. She had people to care about her. If nothing else, she could count on that, that she had friends who loved her, without reason or restraint. Even on Azarath, even when her mother was alive, she had never been sure as she was now.

"…thank you," said Raven, quietly.

"C'mon," said Beast Boy, standing from the bench. "Let's get out of here."

Her eyes darted back to the street corner. Nausea washed queasily over her as she thought of that moment of frailty, of near-death.

She stood up too quickly, and the blood rushed to her head, making her dizzy, but she began walking anyway, with Beast Boy next to her, and it seemed a long while later that shecared enough to askhim where they were going.

"Nowhere," he grinned.

Raven did not like the sound of that.

"Beast Boy," she ground out dangerously through clenched teeth. "Tell me where you think we're going. _Now_."

"Aw, come on, Raven, can't you stand not knowing for a little while? We're almost there." He waggled his eyebrows in a way that was probably meant to be enticing.

"I don't care. Tell me."

"No. Just trust me. I have a good idea."

"_You_ have an idea?" she echoed flatly. "That's reassuring. Now I _really _want to go."

"Talk all you want, but we're going to have fun, and you know it."

She arched an eyebrow sceptically. "I do?"

"Yeah." Beast Boy jabbed a thumb at his chest. "Because I'm a party _animal_. Get it?"

She rolled her eyes. "Maybe you should explain it to me."

"That one must have been really funny," he said, ignoring her,"because you forgot to laugh."

"Riiiight…"

It was easy. In Beast Boy's company, it was too easy to forget about leaving, to stop up the thing inside that told her to go. She was slipping back into old habits, into the rut of the familiar, as if she were lowering into a bath, the water sliding over her like a glove, fitting close and all around.

As Beast Boy had said to her earlier in the infirmary, it was easier just not to think about it.

"We're here!"

Raven looked up at the building they had stopped in front of.

"Oh, no…" she said, even as she battled the sinking feeling of inevitability. "If you think I'd even set foot in there…"

"Don't be a spoilsport, Rae," Beast Boy cajoled. "It'll be fun."

"Define fun," she muttered.

He grinned widely, flashing fangs. "It's that thing you have whenever you're with me."

"I think that's called irritation, Beast Boy."

"Close enough," he said, waving a hand airily. "Come on, Raven, they have more songs than ever before!"

Raven glowered at the large sign above the doorway and folded her arms stubbornly. "Nothing you can say is going to get me to sing karaoke with you."

But within a half an hour the entire team was seated in a private room with a television on one wall and a couple of microphones. Beast Boy had called Cyborg, who in turn had called Starfire, who in turn had dragged Robin with her. Robin and Raven were the only ones who didn't seem enthusiastic, both sitting in a slouch with their arms crossed over their chests.

Although Robin shot her curious glances from time to time, the rest of the Titans seemed too distracted by the prospect of making fools of themselves to ask Raven any questions about her dissapearance. That was fine by her.

She settled into the plush lounge chair to watch them with reluctant amusment.

Starfire sang loudly and off-key to some of the most irritating songs that Raven had ever heard. Cyborg belted out the words soulfully, whether it was show tunes or reggae. Robin muttered all his lines during the one duet that Starfire forced him into. His face was bright red the entire time. Beast Boy dedicated all of his songs to her. Most of them were sappy, and every one of them was ridiculous.

For her part, Raven was forced to say, "I don't sing," more times than she cared to.

But even so, an odd kind of contentment settled over her at this rare normalcy. She drifted away from thought. She laughed with the others. She was just happy, because her friends were happy.

She could feel tiny hands taking her deeper into the well-known trenches of life as it used to be. The surface world of leaving seemed to drift further and further away.

It was late by the time they all returned to the tower. Raven could not bring herself to say that she could not go back with them.

She sat in her room, unwilling to go to bed. She did not know when she would be able to leave again, and she found it difficult to think about. Each time she did, she was met with the same problems as she had been that morning, until she felt like a rat in a maze, turning the same corners again and again, hitting a trail of dead ends.

Her room was dark. She had wanted the others to think she had gone to sleep, although she wasn't sure why. She wondered how much time had passed since they had come back to the tower and realized she did not know.

Eventually, Raven opened her door and padded quietly down the hall towards the kitchen to fix herself a cup of tea. As she approached the living room, she saw that the doors were standing open, spilling out a yellow square of light onto the floor. Voices floated out to her from within. She stood frozen, listening.

"…Have you talked about this with anybody else…?" That was Cyborg. Robin's voice answered, trying for lightness.

"You'd have heard about it already if I had, the way news travels around here."

"Look, man…"

"I know. I really don't want to be the one to say it, but…"

"Then just don't say it, dude."

"But this can't go on forever," Robin pressed. "We're all distracted by it, and I don't know what to do. For the good of the team…"

"Raven is part of the team," said Cyborg.

Standing outside the door, Raven shivered. Her heart gave a sudden spurt of rapid beats. She waited through a long silence. When Robin spoke at last he sounded weary, like a man who had combed the desert and found nothing.

"She's no longer an active member. How can she be?"

Everything seemed to stop.

A rushing sound rose in her ears.

_Go._

Dimly, she heard Cyborg say to Robin, "give it time."

"I have given it time! Something has to change."

Raven knew. She remembered now why she had wanted to leave them - so that she did not become a problem. She had wanted to unburden them before they even felt the weight of it. Now, it was too late for that, and she had to get out, out before it grew worse.

_Go. Go, now._

"… but this is Raven we're talking about. Not some part that needs fixing - _Raven. _You can't just make it better."

"I know. I'm not saying... That's what makes this so -"

_Go._

Raven left before he finished the sentence.

She walked back to her room in a haze. Her only thought was to leave, to leave as quickly and as quietly as she could, to slip seamlessly away without leaving behind so much as a ripple in their lives. Still dressed from the day, she tugged on a jacket and her shoes and then left.

She walked. The city was only a blur in her peripheral vision. She walked right through it, not caring, not caring what her destination was or if she even had one. It seemed she walked for ours, but oddly she did not feel tired. She did not feel anything at all.

She could have been asleep. She felt, at least, as if she were in a dream.

Her vision blurred, but it did not matter because she had no need for sight. Her body moved on its own, as a machine. She was only a passenger, allowed to float away, if she liked, like a dandelion seed.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Blankness, the deep dark of hibernation.

And then, hot smoke clutching her throat on the inside, the rich smell of fire filling all her airways and stopping them up.

With that pain, the world swam back into vision. Raven blinked. There was no fire, no smoke. She swallowed. Her throat felt dry. She scanned the area in confusion, not knowing where she was.

Old, dead buildings surrounded her, graying with age. Some had deep black scars of charcoal as if from a fire. She stood before a black pile of rubble. The rubble of the old library.

Raven's heart constricted. Her eyes were saucer-wide and her mouth hung open. She was suddenly afraid, so much that her jaw ached and her legs gave out beneath her. Briefly, she thought of that morning, of stepping off the curb and staring into headlights.

If she closed her eyes… The childhood habit came back to her. If she closed her eyes, she would be safe. If she could not see them, then they could not see her.

She screwed her eyes shut, and pointed her face toward her lap, needing something to hold on to and not caring what it was.

"Child…" said a voice that tugged at something dangerous and buried in her mind.

Raven looked up, and she could not breathe.

* * *

A/N: I know, I know, one step forward, two steps back.

Let me **defend this chapter** to you, though - I have had this part in my outline since the beginning. It's not stricty necessary to the plot, and I know you all want to see some action. Yes, I could have brought Raven to this point at the end of the last chapter, but that felt rushed to me, and if you have been following this story, you can probably tell that I don't like to rush. I didn't think that Raven had enough emotional momentum at the end of the last chapter to carry her all the way to the library ruins, a place she would normally avoid when she's in her right mind. Also, I wanted a fun chapter, with a little bit of resolution for Raven and Beast Boy before the big showdown. And to top it all off, I have always wanted to insert a karaoke scene into this fic, and reading Mezzo-chan's wonderful collection of drabbles 'Funny Valentine,' in which there is a karaoke segment, reminded me of that. I have always pictured Beast Boy singing the White Stripes song 'Hypnotize'from the Elephant album to Raven. Yes, I'm weird :P

I promise lots of action in the next chapter.

And a note about **Robin and Cyborg's conversation** - it may sound a bit like Robin wants Raven to leave the tower, or something, because that's what Raven is thinking about, but I tried to make the dialogue sound very ambiguous. It's really meant to be Robin venting some frustration about the situation. He cares about Raven, but at the same time she is causing problems for the team, and he is frustrated because he doesn't know what to do about it. But I hope that can be inferred from the conversation...?

Anyway, thanks as always for the excellent reviews! I want to urge you all strongly to review this chapter, or any other chapter, because it would really be great on my end if you did. Feel free to tell me what you think!


	12. xii

xii. Chapter Eleven

* * *

The long silhouette before her seemed to have materialized from nothing, a dark, cloaked shape, stepping fluidly forward, seeming to float like a ghost, like a wreathe of fog. Raven heard no footsteps on the rock-strewn ground. Her breathing was quick and uneven, short gulps of air, the burning of her lungs.

A movement touched the corner of her eye. She turned her head jerkily in that direction. Another figure was coming forward from darkness. Another, and another, and another. They moved with the slow inevitability of a stormhead.

With a shock, Raven realized that the first one was now close enough to touch, was reaching out a hand for her. She saw the movement, slowly, slowly, the splayed moon-white fingers escaping from the wide black hole of the sleeve.

Raven scrambled backward instinctively, pushing herself off the ground with the momentum so that she stood a few feet away, trembling like a leaf. She wrapped her arms around herself defensively. She could not seem to stop trembling.

Something deep inside, beyond reason or memory, was telling her that she ought to be afraid.

"Who are you?" she demanded, trying to pull herself together.

The first figure swayed closer, the elegant white hands gliding up to lower the hood of his dark cloak.

"Don't you know me, daughter of Trigon?"

Raven stared. She took in the crown of white hair, his pale and papery skin, creased with age, his lips turned up in a dangerous smile. Though old, the years had not wasted his body. He was tall, with a look of lean muscle, not feeble in the least. He was like a coiled snake, tense readiness hidden behind languid movements, a tightly held leash of power in wait.

"You're the museum curator," she said, her mind spinning, thinking for some reason, that's not all, that's not all. "Mr. Darber."

He laughed at her, and it was a harsh, joyless sound. His eyes were sharp, seeming to cut through her even from a distance, seeming almost to look straight through her, as if she were made of glass.

"My real name," he told her, his voice smooth and hypnotic, "is Alaric. Now do you remember?"

A sharp, hot pain, and memory burst forth in a confusion of thought.

_"Azar has spoken," boomed the elder, in a tone she had never heard him take. He sounded angry, and afraid. "Leave now, Alaric."_

_"Alaric," mother said distastefully, her nose wrinkling like she was stepping on a bug._

_A name murmured in quiet conversations she was not meant to overhear._

_In the dark, the glitter of a malevolent gaze._

That's not all, she thought, reaching further, further, in up to her elbow, her shoulder, something elusive and sinuous as smoke teasing her fingertips. Raven reached into her memory, pushing forward, straining and stretching her bones, and come, come, come to me, a fiery snap of tendon, of red muscle, until she could not reach any more. She flinched at that failure, filled to burst with frustration.

Her mind was the one thing that she should have been able to control.

"No? You don't remember?" said Alaric, smiling. Suddenly, he was holding up the red jewel that had been stolen from the museum, that had started the whole chain of events. Her eyes widened at seeing it. "Then this truly is a useful tool. More useful than I had anticipated when I created it."

"…you…?" said Raven, her mind spinning fast, patching together the web from clues and memory, weaving connections into a pattern she had not seen before. She stared at Alaric, coming slowly to understand. "What does it do…?"

"It reacts to a strong will by tapping into that person's power. Essentially, it is a wish-granter."

Like Nathan had told them. She narrowed her eyes.

"How long did it take you to make this?"

His eyes said he knew what she was thinking. "It took nearly six months."

"So long?" she asked. He had been here all this time, and she had not had an inkling. "Why didn't you act sooner?"

"The best moves are made when all the pawns are in place."

That was right, he had taken the position as curator, probably so he could plant the jewel when the time came. That was why the records had been so sloppy. They weren't real.

She remembered that day with Robin in the museum.

_"How long ago did he die, if you don't mind my asking?"_

_"…It's close to six months now…"_

"Did you kill him?" she asked, coldly furious, "That man whose job you stole?"

Alaric raised an eyebrow, seeming almost to be affronted. "_I_, kill him? That man's death was mere chance, a sign that fate is on our side. Child, you misunderstand our purpose here."

"Maybe you should explain it to me," said Raven, more confidently than she felt.

"Words will not be necessary."

The gem glinted in his hand, as brilliantly red as Azarath's sun.

Stars exploded in her eyes, a flood of white hot light, and the deluge of memory.

_"They've gone now. You're safe," said the elder, raising the lid of the great cedar chest to let her out._

_"Who?" she asked._

_"Alaric. And his white guard. They are not allowed here - Azar will hear of this… but I fear nothing will come of it."_

_"Why not?"_

_"He would not have dared to come if he thought it was a risk… What am I saying? Do not fret over it. All will be taken care of."_

_Mother shook her head. "We will not speak of him."_

_"To protect the city… Alaric's white guard means to destroy Trigon, and those Trigon has touched. He means to destroy _you_."_

_"Alaric is a dangerous man, with more power than he ought to have."_

_"It is not safe here, anymore," said mother, gently. _

Raven pushed to the surface, tamping the memories back into place. They stuck out strangely, like freshly turned soil. She felt as if she should be gasping for breath.

Alaric, the white guard, things forever on the periphery of her life, whispers overheard without meaning, always an unseen danger. She had seen him once, on the day of her mother's funeral. She had not known then who he was. Now she could remember the odd look of satisfaction in his eyes. Now she understood that strange blankness at seeing the symbol, Alaric's symbol, on the rubble from the library.

Raven was furious. She didn't know what to do, she was so full of anger. Her body shook with rage.

"You _stole_ my memories," she hissed.

"Yes, that was the purpose of the jewel heist," said Alaric, unimpressed by her outrage.

"_Why?_"

"We have searched galaxies, rooting out Trigon's seed. That is the only objective of the white guard. _You _are our only objective. We have no desire for conflict - it seemed the easiest way to lure you out alone, to make you vanish without the smallest trace, was if you did not suspect you were in danger, and to that end, this gem was created."

But now he had restored her memory, and the elder had told her that Alaric was not one to take a risk. He meant to kill her now, had the means to do it, and by his unhurried manner, believed it would not be difficult.

Raven knew that as she was now, she did not stand a chance.

"Of course," Alaric continued, studying the jewel casually, "we did not expect that it would react to your wish. Although it was far more difficult to draw you out, it will certainly be easier to subdue you in your current state."

"My current state?" Raven echoed, trying to think of something that would buy her some time, because that was all she could do. She had to keep him talking. Fortunately, that did not seem overly difficult. "But… I don't have anything of Trigon in me, now. My powers are gone."

"Don't be stupid," said Alaric, scornfully. "Your wish was admirable, but ultimately useless. As Trigon's daughter, he will always be a part of you."

Raven shook her head, wanting to push that truth away. Her teeth were clenched so tight that her jaw ached. Everything in her was rigid. Trigon was not, not ever, a part of her.

"I fought and defeated him," she protested.

Alaric stared at her archly. "Then you are the lesser of two evils. It means nothing."

"Everything I've done… for this city…"

"It doesn't matter what you do, little one. To allow the spawn of Trigon to live would be… simply unforgivable."

"What about you?" said Raven, with an accusing glare. "You destroyed this building, and you used Nathan to get what you wanted - what if he had been arrested? What kind of guard would you be then?"

"You know as well as I do that this was a building slated for demolition." Alaric looked distastefully at the pile of rubble that had been the old library. "It failed as a ploy to distract the Teen Titans, but I did this city a service by destroying it. As for the boy… If you had managed to arrest him, I believe you would have found the charges somewhat slippery, the evidence erroneous. I told you, the best moves…"

He spread his hands. She understood. So, he was not the only one who had taken a position that would be convenient for their planning. No wonder nothing had come of the rendering of Nathan that Robin had sent to the police. And Nathan had told them that one of his professors had mentioned the jewel…

"Why didn't you just steal the jewel yourself?" she asked as it occurred to her.

"Why should I have?" Alaric smiled in a way that made her distinctly uncomfortable. Her backbone seemed to shake itself. "Compulsion is such an easy trick. All I had to do was plant the idea in the boy's mind. The beauty of it is that the victim never really knows. I even used it on you, to bring you out here."

Raven felt suddenly very, very cold.

"_What?_"

The attack on the train. He must have done it then. The impulse to leave had been so strong afterwards, but disturbingly she had not noticed anything unusual. Which thoughts had been hers, and which had been planted? Which feelings were the real ones?

"The thing about compulsion," said Alaric, as idly as a cobra, " as I'm sure you know, is that one must be within the correct range of distance to use it."

Anger came, stealing over her, creeping in like a shadow.

"Are you done stalling for time?" he asked. "Because I'd like to get down to business, and this is really very interesting."

Everything looked as red as fury.

"When one is close enough, as we are now, it is only a matter of applying the correct amount of pressure -"

A sudden jolt of pain left her wide-eyed and gasping for breath.

"- And one can exert even total control over their victim. What do you think of that? All it takes is a little push…"

It was as if her skull had begun to fold inward, crushed like a soda can beneath a tight unyielding pressure. Her limbs began to lose sensation. Her field of vision was slowly darkening.

No, she thought, no, no, no…

Raven grit her teeth and pushed back with all her strength. The effort left her reeling.

"Stay _out_ of my _mind_," she growled, pouring out the anger in her voice, in her eyes. It seemed to radiate from her like a steam.

For a moment, Alaric looked stunned.

"So you have some defenses left, after all," he chuckled, recovering quickly. "That is quite a spell you're under, isn't it?"

"Shut up," Raven spat, sick of the whole encounter.

He held up the jewel speculatively. "You must have wanted to be free of your powers very badly. It's not powerful enough on its own to do such a thing. What do you think will happen, when it's gone?"

And suddenly the jewel was only dust in his hand.

Raven was too tired and too angry to be shocked. She looked numbly at the remains of the gem, nothing but dust. Then she raised her eyes to Alaric.

"Is that all?" she said bleakly.

"That's all for you," he murmured, smiling.

Again she felt that sharp and heavy pressure, a smothering sensation, filling her mouth and eyes and nostrils and all the bloodways of her body. She resisted the call to sleep. She pushed back with her whole self.

A wind whipped up around them, tugging at her hair and clothing. She resisted, she resisted. Her mind was all she had. The only thing she could truly control. She resisted.

"You can't win," came Alaric's voice from far away. "You're powerless."

I'm powerless, she thought, I lost my powers.

Pressing, pressing, pressing, in her eyes, in her nose, on her tongue and her teeth. There was no use. It was in her lungs. It was in her blood, in her hair, in her fingernails.

She was like nothing. She fell far away from the world of physical sensation. She did not remember closing her eyes, but all of a sudden she was opening them and the world had changed around her. She was no longer standing before the ruins of the old library.

Raven saw mist.

She saw miles and miles of it, calm and diaphanous, seeming somehow to be all colors at once. She knew where she was.

"Welcome back," said a voice as cool and gentle as the mist.

The ghostly figure with her face emerged from the fog. Or rather, she _was _the fog. She did not so much emerge from it, as become a tangible presence. It was as if the fog had stepped away, and there she was.

"What happened…?" Raven asked, dreading the answer.

"You retreated here," the figure told her. Suddenly, the entire world seemed to shake, seized with vicious tremors. Raven stumbled.

"What was that?"

"You are in danger," said the figure, without any urgency. "Alaric will kill you."

"I know that," she snapped. "He has my body."

"You let him have it."

"No, I didn't," she argued, uselessly.

"You retreated."

"I could never win!"

The space they were in shook roughly once more. Raven lurched to her knees, and the mist swung into eye-level. It was thick around her. Black birds swooped in, red eyes glaring, and surrounded her.

She heard Alaric's voice sailing to her. _You can't win. You're powerless._

She could see herself stumble in that crucial moment, could see whatever power she had tapped into slipping away like a thing half-dreamt. She saw herself bursting off of the sidewalk into traffic. She saw herself falling from the thief's board, from the window of Titan's Tower, helpless.

A fluttering of wings all around, and the memories dispersed.

"What can I do?" she whispered to herself, to the mist, to the figure, to the empty space. There was no need to differentiate.

The figure gently extended her hand. Raven took it, and as she did she felt as if she had stepped into sunlight. Warmth flooded over her like a babbling creek, trailing, trailing over her, brushing her skin with the tenderness of fleeting kisses.

When she had risen to her feet she was in a different place. Before her was the huge darkness that slept beyond the fog. She touched a hand to it. As before, it was warm and inviting, calling her to press closer.

The other darkness she had seen, smaller and denser and less alive, was gone.

"That was the memories that were stolen," said the figure, but Raven felt no surprise, as if she had already known it. The figure swept her fingertips along the vast blackness slowly, wistfully like a lover. "Do you know… what this is?"

Raven looked at the dark mass, quivering with life, its vibration resonating to the lowest part of her.

"My powers…" she said, wonderingly. "They're still here…"

She felt as hollow as a drum. She was a vessel for this great thing that was too big and too much for her.

"They are a part of you," the figure told her. "No amount of wishing can change that."

No. Nothing real was ever that simple.

"But… I can't go back," said Raven desperately. "I can't go back to that cage."

"Don't go back," the figure smiled. Raven felt warm and heady, as if she were floating and filled with yellow sunshine. "Move forward."

"What…?"

The figure took her hands. Heat coursed through her at the contact. She could only look about drowsily as the black birds came and swallowed them up.

She saw her mother and her child-self, Arella crouched inelegantly before her, pressing a cool kiss to her forehead, saying softly, "I'll protect you, little bird. Do not fear."

She saw the elder, sealing her inside the cedar chest, where precious things were kept. Later, he said to her, "I want you to be happy."

Just as Beast Boy had said.

"I just want you to be happy. That's all."

She saw herself returning to Azarath in desperation, when Trigon had come, and everything seemed gray and lost. The bronze towers were empty. It had become a city of ghosts, a ruined place. She had felt the burning of the city in her body. Her nerves were on fire. Everything hurt. Arella had been surrounded by doves, had turned to her and said, "you will forever have the love of your people," and she had not believed it.

"It is not safe here, anymore," her mother had said.

"It is not safe for you to stay here any longer," the elder had said.

"It's not safe for you to be out here alone," Beast Boy had said.

In darkness, the figure floated close to her, speaking to the shell of her ear. "Can't you see it? Can't you see what it means?"

"It means I'm weak," said Raven, forgetting to breathe. Her body was still.

"It means they love you. You know this."

She thought of her mother, leaving her first with the monks, and then dying and leaving her forever. She thought of Malchior. She thought of slowly slipping away.

"Don't be afraid."

"I _am _afraid!" said Raven, her voice breaking. "That's why… that's why I'm always running away…"

Her life had been spent running from Trigon and her fate, from Alaric, from her mother. She had run from all feeling, from self-knowledge, from the guilty desire to be rid of her powers forever. And she had run from Robin, from Starfire and Cyborg, from Beast Boy…

She had only wanted to stop hurting. She had wanted to eliminate pain. But everything else had gone with it.

"Denial is what hurts. It's okay for you to stop running."

A breath of hot air poured over her. She felt light.

"Can you let yourself be happy?"

"I… can try," said Raven, not knowing the voice that was speaking to her. It sounded like…

"Good. Just to be happy… that is the highest thing anyone can aspire to. Don't be afraid of it. Move forward."

Pain touched the edge of awareness, crept in closer, closer, burning through her nerves. Flickering light cut across her vision.

"What's happening?" Raven asked.

"You have to wake up now. You'll die if you don't."

That voice. It sounded like…

"Wake up!"

It sounded like her mother.

Raven fought to open her eyes, struggling through the thick, bleak dark of unconsciousness. Small hands seemed to grab at her and pull her back down, but she pushed, pushed, _pushed_ into waking. Her eyelids fluttered. Her body arched and contorted with pain. She gasped, sucking in air.

She screamed.

She had never felt pain as intensely as she did now. Her whole body ached. Every part of her was screaming, wrapped up with toe-curling, nail-ripping, pulling, grinding, bleeding pain. Make it stop, she thought, again and again, make it stop. Her fingers reached out, grasping uselessly, scrabbling in the dirt. Her eyes clenched shut. Tears leaked out.

"Would you like me to tell you how you're going to die?"

Raven opened her eyes enough to make out Alaric standing over her. Through the pain, his words were slow to register.

"At this moment, your soul is being separated from your body and destroyed. There will be no chance for resurrection, no afterlife. It is as complete a death as one could ask for."

She became aware of the low chanting of a spell in the background. The other robed figures, the members of the white guard, were seated in meditative stance all around her, murmuring the words that were slowly draining her life away.

"You might feel some discomfort… It has always seemed to me to be a painful procedure, when I've put it to use in the past. No, you're not the first. But perhaps it will comfort you in your last moments to know that I was far more merciful to your mother when I killed her."

Raven hooked her gaze on Alaric's face.

Her body twisted with pain. The words themselves seemed almost not to matter. She hated that face. She had never hated anyone as completely as she hated him in that moment. She was on fire, boiling with fury, wanting to rip, wanting to tear into pieces, hating, hating, hating so _much_ she thought it would kill her. She was already dying.

I'll kill you, she thought.

Pain brushed its fingers along the lines of her body, pain that made her bite her lip until the taste of blood, pain that made her want to rip her teeth out.

I'll kill you, I'll killyou, I'llkillyou.

"I'll kill you," Raven muttered, first weakly, then stronger, a wave washing through her, washing through, "_I'll kill you!_"

"Not," said Alaric, leaning over her, sickeningly smug, "if I kill you first."

Then there was a sudden blast, cut by beams of blue light.

Dust rose up, the chanting stopped for shouts of confusion. The pain bled away, leaving her weak and trembling on the ground.

When the dust faded, she could see that Alaric was still nearby. He looked down at her with disgust.

"The Teen Titans," he said, his voice marked with irritation. "We have no business with them, yet they insiston interfering with yours."

The Titans were here. Raven hadn't thought it possible after all that had happened, but very slowly, lying there in the dirt and rubble, she smiled.

* * *

A/N: Wooh… intense :D

Sorry for the bit of lateness. Oddly, I've been somewhat busy.

Anyway, have I ever told you all how wonderful you are? Thanks for the reviews! I love to hear what you think, so please drop me a note, even if it's just a little one, I would really, really appreciate it. Yes. :D


	13. xiii

xiii. Chapter Twelve

* * *

The Titans had appeared over the top of the mound of rubble that had once been the library. Robin stood in front, fists clenched around his weapons, ready to move. Cyborg had his cannon charged, glowing a violent blue. Starfire's eyes and fists blazed green. Beast Boy just looked tense, crouched in readiness, fangs bared. The air around him was charged with energy.

It was a struggle for Raven to lift her head enough to look at them. She was weak. Her body felt empty and limp as a rag doll's. Periodically she trembled from the aftershock of pain, her scattered nerves firing off wildly at nothing. But it didn't really matter anymore - relief was bearing down on her, relief like a torrent, like a breaking of the dam, blaring and blazing, trumpets and hot sun even in the night. She was floating. She could have wept.

"Alright," said Robin into the stillness of the settling dust, "we don't know who you are, or why you're here…"

"But if you wanna get to Raven," Beast Boy continued, "you're gonna have to go through us first."

"Move away from the girl, man," Cyborg ordered in a hard voice, gesturing to Alaric with his canon. "And do it slowly."

Raven's eyes flicked to Alaric as he stepped gravely forward toward the Titans. She wanted to tear him apart. She wanted that more than anything she could think of. He was a tall, dark shape, seeming to float rather than walk, the long fall of his black robe swallowing everything, until it was all she could see. A fierce, red bloom of anger welled up.

She closed her eyes, cutting it off. A shiver ran through her wasted body. She concentrated on breathing, taking air in gently, allowing it to travel to her lungs, and releasing it back to the world. One breath at a time, slowly.

"I have no desire to fight you," she heard Alaric saying.

"Then give Raven to us, and we won't have a problem," Cyborg shot back.

"But if you interfere with our plans we will have no choice," Alaric continued as if Cyborg had not spoken. His voice was as severe as thunder. "This girl cannot be allowed to live."

"What?" said Beast Boy angrily. "What has Raven ever done to you?"

Raven opened her eyes. She saw Alaric's shoulders rise and fall as he sucked in a breath. He passed a hand slowly and stiffly over his crown of white hair. As if sensing her eyes on him, he turned suddenly and caught her gaze. Something black and hideous seemed to lurk quietly behind his stare.

Raven hated him with everything she had. She hated his voice, she hated his height and the rigid straightness of his back. She hated his face, she hated the stony eyes in it and she hated the blue, blue veins in his milk-white hands and the bluntness of his fingernails. And she hated his thick, white hair, and she hated his shoulders and his arms, his legs and his elbows, his lungs and his heart, she hated, hated, hated -

Stop, Raven told herself, choking on the dark, heavy feeling. _Stop_.

"She should never have been forced upon this unwilling world," said Alaric, without looking away from her. "Every one of Trigon's offspring is but a tool which he may use to conquer new planets. Despite his defeat, as long as this girl lives there is a chance for Trigon to return. She is bad blood. Her mere survival invites danger. She cannot be allowed to live, to procreate, to carry on Trigon's line."

"But… Raven truly has caused no harm," Starfire argued.

Alaric raised a brow. "She has ushered Trigon into this world once before. That is not what you call _harm_?"

"We've defeated Trigon before," said Robin. "We can do it again."

Alaric laughed harshly at that. Raven remembered seeing him in the museum, in his crisp, gray suit, and how even his smile had been a miserable thing.

"You may be willing to take that chance. I am not." Alaric's mouth became a line of grim determination. "Now, if you still wish to stop me, then you leave me no choice but to fight."

Raven strained to sit up. Her body was heavy with exhaustion, and when she made it to her knees she was dizzy from the effort and from blood-rush. Her vision swam. But, if she could not fight…

…if she could not fight…

Then she had to get out of the way. In the corner of her eye, Alaric's hand gestured forward. There was a whisper of fabric, and suddenly the robed figures of the white guard were stepping past her, all around, until they stood beside Alaric like a sentinel row of trees and all she could see were their backs.

She heard Robin's voice.

"Titans, go!"

Raven made herself climb to her feet.

A blast shook the ground. The distinct, familiar sounds of Cyborg's cannon and Starfire's shots of energy rang out. Raven looked up, her heart pounding. She hardly noticed that she had been knocked back down to her knees.

Alaric and his guard had made a shield to hold off the Titans' attack. It worked for a few moments, but Raven knew it would not hold out forever, could already feel it sagging around the weakest members. She got up as quickly as she could and staggered toward the end of the line of enemies - only four men long in her position, eight total. Her mind was whirring. If she could make it out from under their shield, she might then make it back to her friends.

Another blast, a noise like a gunshot, like a strike of lightning, and the shield was cracked. Rubble flew, and Raven had to crouch down low. She saw the weaker members falling, saw bursts of gray energy being thrown from the hands of the stronger ones, saw green and blue lights exploding over her head and Robin's trademark weapons flying, seeming to be everywhere at once in a great swarm.

It was all a blur, shouting, lights in her eyes, dust in her lungs. She coughed out the dust and the smoke. She was helpless. What was she doing here? Blurs of gray, bright blue, green, red, rubble flying out to get her. Why couldn't she _fix _this?

And then, suddenly, Beast Boy was there, leaping through the line of enemies as a huge wolf. In one fluid motion he transformed back to himself and crouched beside her. He touched a hand to her shoulder.

"Rae!" he said. There was so much urgency in his voice, in his eyes, and the tension of his body, that it seemed to swallow him. "Raven, are you hurt?"

"Yes," she breathed, momentarily stunned at his intensity and his abrupt arrival. "But I'll be alright, I think."

He smiled at her, encouragingly. "Can you walk?"

"Not well," she admitted, eyes darting quickly to where the Titans were fighting. She saw Starfire and Cyborg firing away, their blasts sometimes meeting the oncoming gray energies in midair and exploding outwards, fizzling to nothing. Starfire swooped in for closer combat, but the white guard were careful to avoid her. Robin had engaged his bo staff, and gone for Alaric. With a look of deep concentration, Alaric manipulated the library rubble as a defense, great rocks flinging themselves through the air each time he lifted a hand. Robin was too busy dodging or shattering the rubble to press his attack.

Raven's hand formed a tight little fist.

"Come on," said Beast Boy, startling her, seeming to wake her from dreaming to the loud and uncertain reality of the battle. Before she knew what was happening, he had scooped her up in his arms as if she weighed nothing at all. She reached automatically around his shoulders, gripping closely, nails biting in to him as he ran crazily toward the other Titans, ducking and weaving to avoid the shots of energy and the flying rubble.

Raven did not have the will to protest. She held on tightly to him. For a moment, she raised her head to look over Beast Boy's shoulder. Alaric was looking back. The corners of his lips rose into an unpleasant smile as his mouth formed the words -

"Lights out."

Raven's eyes went wide.

The moving stones dropped from the air. The white guard snapped into focus, hands folding into the meditative pose. Robin, Cyborg, and Starfire all stiffened up, and then fell to the ground in lifeless heaps, as if the thumb of some great force had come down and crushed them, marionettes and cut strings, moving and then suddenly just… not. It was quiet.

"Beast Boy," said Raven, hardly noticing that he had stopped running in shock, his mouth hanging slightly open. Her heart was in her throat. "Beast Boy, _do something_."

"Okay," he said, shakily, allowing her to stand on her feet. She felt his heart beating wildly. She saw his eyes go completely, brilliantly white. He shuddered as he gave himself over, as he let go.

"Don't… don't worry."

Almost before she could blink he had transformed into the beast, more huge and more terrible than she had ever seen. Her legs gave out, and she dropped to the ground. He towered over her. Her eyes had to climb for miles to find his face, sharp, protruding tusks, snarling muzzle, flattened nostrils, fierce, white eyes and furrowed brow. He was fearsome, but she was not afraid.

Beast Boy lifted a massive paw and stepped forward, growling from deep within his chest. It rumbled through her. Raven followed his gaze to where Alaric was standing.

"What did you do to them?" she demanded angrily.

"Don't you remember? It's the same thing I did to you - once they were distracted by the battle, I made them sleep. When they wake, you will be gone, no matter the strength of your guard dog. At this stage, physical power is insignificant."

Raven felt a rustling of air, and then Beast Boy was leaping toward Alaric. But it came to nothing. Alaric swung himself aside, levitating, his feet never touching the ground. Beast Boy skidded to a stop and whirled around, snarling. One smug corner of Alaric's mouth lifted.

"Now for you," he said.

Beast Boy surged forward as Alaric's eyes narrowed in concentration. Raven could sense his powers at work, a cool fluttering hitting somewhere between skin and bone. She watched, tension gripping her body, gripping her heart so tightly that it seemed not to beat at all. She could only think that even in his transformed state, Beast Boy would fall just as the other Titans had fallen. She watched and waited.

Nothing but the powerful beating of Beast Boy's paws against the ground as he barreled forward.

Alaric's eyes widened. "_What?_"

Beast Boy slammed into the shield that Alaric had erected at the last moment. The impact forced Alaric to his knees, but he sprung immediately up and levitated in retreat.

Beast Boy pressed forward relentlessly. Alaric began to call huge pieces of rubble to meet him, but Beast Boy either stoically allowed the stones to glance off of him or batted them easily aside. The remaining robed figures joined in moving the boulders defensively, and Beast Boy whirled on them and knocked them down like flies, hardly stopping.

Raven had never seen him fight with such deadly single-mindedness, moving forward, forward without thought beyond the goal. Awe pressed in on her, against her will. But as he was now, a creature of instinct and emotion, she did not know that he was able to really think at all.

Was that what was saving him from Alaric's compulsion to sleep? That, in becoming the beast, his mind had given over entirely to impulse, had retreated to where no one could touch it?

"Enough of this," Raven heard Alaric mutter.

The largest block of rubble yet rose up, eclipsing Alaric. Beast Boy made no move to dodge, seemed set on crashing through all that stood in his way. The rock sailed toward him. Raven sensed a gathering of power from Alaric, so much that it seemed almost to burn.

Her heart thundered.

"Look out!" she cried, full of panic, shaking with it, useless, useless. What could she do? She rose, shakily, to her feet. "Beast Boy!"

But if he heard, he gave no sign. He ran, head-down like a bull, straight into the boulder that was coming for him. He gave a short grunt of pain as it collapsed into pieces around him.

At that moment, Alaric released the energy he had been building in one great rush toward Beast Boy. It left Raven feeling raw all over. It sent Beast Boy flying, crashing into the bottom floor of one of the many old and empty buildings. With a wave of Alaric's hand, the entire seven-story building came down on top of him, burying him beneath.

Time seemed to stretch itself idly like a cat, to slow, slow everything, to thicken into amber. Raven did not know how long she stood there, staring at the pile of debris, waiting. But Beast Boy did not get up.

"I regret that this had to happen…. But I've come too far now to turn back…"

Raven looked at Alaric. His back was turned to her. He seemed almost to be speaking to himself.

Anger burned through the deadness then, boiling up to a place where she could reach out and grasp it. There was so much hate running through her body, in her veins, making her head swim. She was heady with it. Everything seemed to sharpen focus. The rise and fall of her chest, the beating of her heart. Fury. Something stirring in the deep.

Alaric turned to face her. She listened to the rustle of his cloak. Her eyes burned.

"Well," said Alaric, sounding almost humbled, "it appears I'll have to kill you the old fashioned way."

Raven did not see the blow coming. Suddenly she was thrown off of her feet by a burst of Alaric's power. She flew backward, hitting the ground with a shattering thud and skidding in the dirt to a stop. It knocked the wind out of her. For a moment, she could not breathe, could not seem to force the air into her lungs. Slowly, painfully, she propped herself up on her elbows.

But Alaric was flying toward her like a bolt of lightening. Instinctively, Raven rolled out of the way and pushed herself fluidly to a stand. He whirled around in the blink of an eye and before she knew what was happening, Alaric's fist was in her stomach and she was bent over, choking. She slumped to the ground.

"I expected you to put up more of a fight."

"I did, too," she mumbled, absently, without much thought.

Dazedly, Raven looked up at him. Everything was slow. Motion blurred.

"It's easier this way," he said.

Almost tenderly, his hands came up, long and pale, and wrapped around her throat. She felt a gentle, building pressure there. It began to hurt, and her vision faded, and she was straining for something against this terrible tightness which seemed all she could feel or be certain of.

I'm going to die, she thought suddenly, I am dying now.

Burning, burning all over. She was on fire, as white-hot as a supernova, bursting and blazing across the universe, and everything was bright and beautiful, and wanting to be part of it, and a feeling of oneness, and I'll protect you, little bird. I'll protect you.

Raven heard somebody shout. Her eyes opened.

She saw Alaric yards away, getting up slowly from the ground, and knew somehow that she had done that. Her hand touched her throat, and it was tender. She breathed in hungrily.

Her powers had protected her. She reached for them, experimentally, and found the dark place in her mind, the barrier that separated her from her powers. Warmth spread through her at the contact. She pressed, slowly, insistently. It was softer, but it would not yield.

Raven stood up and saw that Alaric was already on his feet.

"I've come too far to turn back," he murmured. He seemed far from here, far from this moment. His gaze sharpened as it turned to Raven. "It always pays to be ruthless, doesn't it?"

She watched him with wide and wary eyes. He raised his hands.

In the background, something stirred. Raven's mouth went dry. She swallowed convulsively.

Slowly and quietly, like sleepwalkers, Robin, Cyborg, and Starfire rose from the ground and to their feet. They came forward at a flick of Alaric's wrist, and Raven felt herself shuffle instinctively back.

"I'll be curious to see how well you fight against your comrades," said Alaric, smiling grimly, his eyes sharp and narrow with anticipation.

Fury slithered along her senses, and she grabbed a hold of it and tugged it fiercely to the forefront. Her fists clenched. A red fog seemed to wrap around her, hot and angry. Something was expanding inside her, filling out the small spaces of her body, flooding her through and through, into her teeth and her nails and her heart, expanding, expanding, expanding. She dug in deeply, she reached in with her whole self.

A wind rose, flapping all around her, tangling her hair. Everything was red, red as the evening on Azarath, low sun in the sky, red as fire, as red as she could stand it. Her eyes burned. Her skin burned.

"To let anger rule you…" said Alaric, musingly, "that is the way to reach your powers. It touches their true nature. It would be easy now for that side of you to take control…"

Hate seemed all there was, hate that burned holes in her, writhing like an animal, pressing, pressing, rising closer to the surface, and then, and then…

No. _No._

"I _won't _let that happen." She said it like a command. Her voice was full of gravel, heavy and charged. It seemed to shake the ground.

She reached out and grasped at chaos, held it in her fist, and it burned there like a star. She pressed it to her heart and swallowed it in, called to it, letting it fill her up, letting it wash over and over and over her, until suddenly she felt new again, like a fresh, green shoot. Wind whipped up, snapping violently.

Then the Titans leapt to attack.

Raven was immediately on the defensive. Power moved fluidly through her, light and free as air. She did not have to bend it to her will, because it _was _her will already. Black shields formed around her, and they were like pieces of her own body, not tools, not weapons, but like her own hands. Creating them was as instinctive as walking. There was no thought, no leap of concentration. She hardly knew what she was doing.

She blocked attacks from all sides. Robin, Starfire, and Cyborg closed in on her, fists and bolts and weapons all flying in, and she could only retreat and block and retreat. The Titans were not up to form, their movements sluggish and messy under Alaric's control. But Raven was weakened through and through. The power within her was a bright light illuminating an empty husk, the only thing enabling her to fight. Her body was heavy with exhaustion. Moving grew more and more difficult.

Lightly she brushed against the minds of the Titans, but the heavy compulsion that controlled them repelled her like a barrier. She could not win physically. She could not touch them mentally. It almost didn't matter. What she had to remember, even as Robin's projectiles sliced the air close by her neck, was that the one she needed to defeat was Alaric. Raven looked for him beyond the battlefield. He was pale and drawn with concentration. Sweat beaded at his temples. He was kneeling on the ground. He was -

Suddenly, Starfire's fist was rushing toward her. Raven swung wildly out of the way. The blade of Robin's projectile whispered against her cheek, leaving a line of warm and wet. Raven touched her fingers to the spot, and they came away smeared with blood. She looked almost wonderingly at it, the odd smudge of red. Robin had done that - no, Alaric.

A streak of blue sped toward her, and Robin swung his bo staff, and Starfire was bearing down from above.

Stop, she thought, stop, _stop_.

And then, _somebody, help me…_

And then…

…and then, and then…

Time stopped.

Her senses shot out over the area, seeking, seeking automatically, without thought, without reason, tumbling over the distance like a bullet, like a heartbeat, like a falling star. She felt herself swallow thickly as if from a great distance. Her body was far behind. Her mind was reaching out, was searching for a sign of life within the rubble where Beast Boy had fallen.

Are you there? she thought, _Are you there?_

Something pulsed beneath the stroke of that thought. She felt the contractions of the heart. She felt blood traveling in the veins. She sensed the shape of his body. Oddly, he had not transformed back. She touched along the ridges of his mind until it seemed to open for her, to welcome her in.

Inside was hot and dark like a dog's mouth. Flickering light scattered across the emptiness, flush against the growling shadows.

"Are you there?" she shouted. Her voice echoed back at her. "Beast Boy!"

She felt alone. This was what Alaric had found when he had tried to take control of Beast Boy. It was a nothingness so intense that she forgot herself, forgot the existence outside.

But… this could not be all there was. It could not. She knew better than that.

Beast Boy, she thought, remembering the uncertainty of their first meeting, remembering his heavy hands, his face, the fang that stuck out of his smile, his arm across her shoulders, the jokes and the birthday parties and the ridiculous plush dolls in the bottom of her closet, his wrists poking out of the hospital scrubs, video games, soy milk and tofu bacon, her name, her name, her name on his lips, and telling her it's okay, it's okay, I'll protect you, pointing out the north star, wind in his hair, the hot breath of the beast on her neck, and his real name was Garfield Logan, he had sheepishly admitted, but everybody called him Gar -

Descending, descending, a slow sinking down into the gray matter.

Voices floated out to her.

"_Look at this sky, my darling boy. Don't worry."_

_"To do whatever it takes… That is our oath. Don't take it lightly, Beast Boy."_

She fell further and further in, thinking only of his shoulder blades and his thick gloves, the smell of his soap and the length of his body, the way his ribcage fluttered when he cat-napped on the couch, the mess in his room, the sprawl of his sleeping body, his finger in the peanut butter jar and his nose in everybody's business, mixing up the toothpastes, singing in the shower -

" '_Yes! In the sea of life enisled -'"_

_"Larry! I'm sick of poetry. Enough with the poetry! All I asked was -"_

"_What's it like to be in love? … It hurts, kid."_

- loud and off-key over the spray of water, long limbs and wide eyes and smiling all the time -

"_We're still you're family. You don't have to go, Beast Boy."_

"_Yes, I do."_

She closed her eyes, drowning, filling up with second-hand memories, losing herself in the rush of it, losing the place where Raven ended and Beast Boy began, unable to extricate her own emotions from his. She couldn't breathe.

"_I thought that I could trust you!"_

"_She was… in your teeth…"_

It seemed as if she might fall forever.

"Are you there?" she cried in desperation, not expecting any answer.

There was too much here for her. She had gone too deep. But then, in a small voice…

"I'm here."

Her eyes opened.

They were standing in a field full of brown wild grass, dotted with bushes and with squat, flat-topped trees. Was this… Beast Boy's Africa?

"Raven," he said abruptly, eyes widening, "your hair, it's… you're back to normal!"

"What?" she pulled at a strand of it, and it was long, long and indigo. Only a small part of her was shocked, and that seemed buried by all else. At this moment, it was just not important. She shook her head, feeling the length of the hair floating about her.

"Raven," he said, looking at her closely, "are you okay? You're crying."

Raven rubbed her eyes, surprised when her fingers came away wet.

She looked up at him briefly, blinking, and then suddenly she was wrapping her arms around him, clutching him as tightly as a secret, never wanting to let go.

"Raven…?"

"I'm just… glad you're alright," she mumbled into his shoulder, overcome with love at that moment, love that made her weak in the knees. "I'm glad that I found you."

"After I transformed it was dark, and then… you came," said Beast Boy softly, his words fluttering into her hair. "I… can hardly remember anything. Raven… what happened?"

"Alaric is controlling the other Titans, and I…" Raven closed her eyes, leaning into him carelessly. "…I can't fight them. I need your help, Beast Boy. I have to break Alaric's hold, but I can't do it when he's so focused. His powers are… knotted up, and I can't break through. If Robin and the others are out of the way, then I think I can get inside his mind, and… and stop all this. Please, help me."

"I thought - I thought you would have figured it out by now," said Beast Boy.

"What…?"

"I'd do anything for you."

A great rushing seemed to swell around her. She pulled back slowly. They were standing then by the water before Titan's Tower.

"Help me," said Raven.

"I will."

"Let me share your body," she said.

"Okay," Beast Boy nodded. Then he winked. "You're the boss."

She took his hand. "Let's go."

"Wha - ? Now?"

But they were already moving upwards, shooting upwards towards the sky, Raven leading him further up from the deep, knowing somehow that she could. The past rushed by, all around them, the old world of Africa, of Titans Tower, of familiar places, falling away, becoming smaller and yet smaller, becoming gray and indistinguishable. Up and up they went, unstoppable, until they were breaking surface and stumbling headlong into the bright outside.

Raven opened her eyes.

She saw the rubble-strewn field, the Titans poised to attack, Cyborg's laser a hair's breadth from her eyes, Starfire's fists above her head, Robin's bo staff touching her side lightly, tickling against the fluttering of her ribcage. And she saw the darkness beneath the fallen building, dense and claustrophobic, hot and thick with dust, and felt the heavy, smothering pressure of the wreckage. Her body heaved a sigh and sunk into the ground.

Time began.

The attacks of the Titans collapsed in on each other and sent the fighters sprawling. They rose stiffly in confusion.

Raven pulled her body from within the earth up to a spot before the fallen building and folded it into a meditative pose, gathering for a spell. She sent a stream of life into the body of the beast, she pushed him from the ground. The body was heavy, was tired and beaten. She opened wider the channel between them. She pushed him from the ground. Jump, she told the body, and it obeyed.

Out from beneath the rubble came the beast, with a sigh of earth like thunder, leaping forward, streaming trails of dust and dirt from his mane. He landed heavily on the ground in front of Raven, his back to her, his eyes wild, flanks heaving. She felt his body as if it were her own, the burning of his lungs, the stiffness of the muscles that must be willed to move, everything straining, heart pumping frantically. Wider she opened the channel, trying to soothe some of the weariness.

She heard Alaric's voice, as if from far away.

"This is more like it," he said, laughing coldly. With a wave of his hand he gathered the Titans before him.

They faced each other, she behind the beast, he behind the Titans.

The Titans leapt to attack, and Raven, swallowing thickly, urged the beast forward. The beast dodged Robin's projectiles, only to be hit in the side with a blast from Cyborg's cannon. Raven pushed away the pain from his body, sending a cool tendril of healing energy out toward the spot. He was grazed again, by one of Starfire's bolts. Raven poured more of herself into him. She opened wider the channel. She urged him forward, urged him toward Alaric.

The beast took a blow from Robin's bo staff, and Raven hissed in pain. Confusion skittered across her vision. As if in a dream she saw the beast, she saw ground rushing beneath her paws, she saw, she saw… She saw Alaric, and then she remembered.

The beast was nearly upon Alaric now. Raven pulled him back, pulled him into the ground and forced herself forward so fast it made her dizzy. She was in front of Alaric. She jerked her mind from the beast, collapsing the channel, but her consciousness seemed to skid forward, to snap away from her like a rubber band, and she looked up and Alaric's eyes were grey and wide.

She saw Trigon. She saw death and fire, red as hate, smoldering in the blackness of space. It was dark and empty. And then Azar came, but came too late. And to grow was all that could be done, to become greater and more powerful, not to be defeated or withstood. She saw herself, her mother… and then banishment, the return to that dark emptiness, and nothing to occupy but thoughts of revenge and of vengeance. Raven floated through Alaric's consciousness, stumbled through to the end until somehow she was pulling back to herself and seeing from her own eyes again.

She looked at Alaric, fallen to one knee before her, breathing heavily with exhaustion. He looked up at her. The spell that she had been preparing was ready.

"You're going to kill me," he said coolly.

"No," Raven answered. A black hole, a tear in the universal fabric, appeared in the air behind him. "I'm going to banish you."

The look of horror that stole across his face suggested that he would have preferred to die. The black hole swallowed him and each of his followers before he could scream.

Raven mended the tear without much thought, realizing with a distant kind of surprise that she was utterly exhausted, that she had run herself dry of anything that might keep her going. She wondered what had happened to Beast Boy. She heard somebody shout her name.

Her body dropped heavily to the ground and deep sleep took her into its arms and let her rest.

* * *

A/N: I know it's been like a thousand years, but… better late than never, right, hehe? I honestly don't know when/if the next chapter will come out, but rest assured it's a happy ending.

Thanks to all my reviewers! I hope you enjoyed this chapter. I'd really like it if you reviewed… Please?


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